The Power Africa Initiative is a project driven by US President Barack Obama that aims to double access to power in Africa. Power Africa aims to add more than 10,000 megawatts of cleaner, more efficient electricity generating capacity, and in the process electrifying at least 20-million new households and commercial entities with on-grid, mini-grid, and off-grid solutions.
The six initial partner countries are Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania. They have set ambitious goals to boost their power generating capacity with the ultimate aim of enhancing energy security, decreasing poverty and fostering economic growth.
At Standard Bank Group, we’re helping to finance projects under the Power Africa initiative while at the same time actively leading the policy reform process required to facilitate increased private sector investment in Africa’s power sector.
We are seeing an increasing pipeline of power projects across sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2013 we committed to arrange funding of at least US$150-million of debt in the near term across the Power Africa countries, while more recently that amount has risen to over US$400-million, principally in Kenya and Nigeria, with smaller transactions in Ghana and Tanzania.
Our commitment to Power Africa is to help fund an additional US$600-million of debt in the Power Africa countries through 2018, taking our total since joining the initiative a year ago to US$1-billion. We are also looking at arranging a further US$2-billion across the rest of sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2018.
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