AfDB Desert to Power — what's actually built, what's still proposal

<p>The African Development Bank&#x27;s Desert to Power initiative, announced in 2018 with a target of 10 GW of solar generation across the Sahel by 2030, has been one of the more ambitious continental infrastructure programmes of the post-2015 period. The eleven-country Sahelian programme footprint — Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti — covers the part of the continent with the highest solar irradiance and some of the lowest electrification rates.</p> <p>The progress against the 10 GW target has been substantially behind schedule. As of late-2024 reporting, somewhere between 800 MW and 1.2 GW of Desert-to-Power-attributable capacity is operational, depending on attribution rules — the AfDB counts capacity that received D2P concessional financing or technical assistance, which captures some projects whose primary financing came from other sources. The honest figure for D2P-specific additions is closer to 600 MW. To get to 10 GW by 2030 would require accelerating to over 1.5 GW per year for the next six years — a pace that has not yet been demonstrated in any single year of the programme.</p> <p>The Mauritanian Boulenouar wind-and-solar hybrid, the Senegalese Senergy and Ten Merina solar plants, the Burkinabé Zagtouli 33-MW plant (the largest in West Africa when it opened in 2017, now substantially smaller in relative terms), and the Nigerian Nasarawa solar additions are the projects most visibly attributed to the programme. The Sudanese and Eritrean components have been effectively frozen by the 2023 war and the longer-running Eritrean political isolation; the Malian and Burkinabé components have been disrupted by the 2020–2023 coups and the subsequent withdrawal of French and EU institutional support; the Nigerien component has been disrupted by the 2023 coup and the subsequent ECOWAS sanctions regime.</p> <p>The AfDB&#x27;s *Light Up and Power Africa* publications, IRENA&#x27;s Sahelian renewable potential assessments, and the Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) reports have all argued that the Sahelian solar resource is the most under-exploited large-scale renewable resource on the continent. The argument is correct on the physical resource. The political-economy constraint is that the off-take and transmission infrastructure needed to monetize the resource — the regional interconnections via the West African Power Pool, the regulatory frameworks for cross-border power purchase agreements, the local-currency tariff structures — are exactly the institutional capacities that the Sahelian security crisis is eroding.</p> <p>The instructive comparison is the Maghrebine solar build-out — Morocco&#x27;s Noor Ouarzazate, the Tunisian and Algerian utility-scale solar PV programmes — which has proceeded on a faster trajectory because the institutional context (functioning national utilities, stable regulatory frameworks, accessible international concessional finance) is more developed. Desert-to-Power&#x27;s challenge is to replicate the Maghrebine institutional preconditions in the Sahelian context, which has been the bottleneck the AfDB has not yet solved.</p>