Middle East & Africa | The green continent

Africa will remain poor unless it uses more energy

Greenhouse-gas emissions south of the Sahara are tiny

A school going girl doing her homework at night using Solar a lights. M-KOPA Solar, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, is the global leader of 'pay-as-you-go' energy for off-grid customers. The success of M-KOPA (M= mobile, KOPA= to borrow) stems from making solar products affordable to low-income households on a pay-per-use installment plan. Customers acquire solar systems for a small deposit and then purchase daily usage “credits' for US $0.45, or less than the price of traditional kerosene lighting. After one year of payments customers own their solar systems outright and can upgrade to more power.
|ACCRA, DAKAR, JOHANNESBURG AND LUDERITZ

A window seat in a helicopter flying south-west from Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, offers an otherworldly diorama. The landscape shifts from earthly desert to Mars-red dunes, then to moonscape as the chopper nears Luderitz. In the early 1900s this tiny port was the hub for a diamond boom that brought the art-nouveau mansions that perch on the town’s slopes. More than a century on, Namibia hopes that the area will again bring riches, this time from sun, wind and land, by hosting one of Africa’s largest renewable-energy projects.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Powering Africa”

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From the November 5th 2022 edition

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