Scaling Up Energy Investment Across Africa

Highlights

• One guarantee will cover 100 projects across up to 20 countries, creating a model for scalable investment.

• The projects will replace unreliable, poor-quality energy with renewable energy businesses can count on to support job creation.

• Through a creative contracting structure that better aligns with a region-wide strategy, MIGA will enable CrossBoundary Energy Holdings to make investments more efficiently.

For decades, businesses in Africa have struggled with unreliable, poor-quality electricity—marked by frequent outages, voltage fluctuations, and inconsistent supply—that disrupt operations, damage equipment, and drive up costs. Even when the lights stay on, power quality issues like voltage sags, surges, and frequency variations can destroy sensitive equipment, ruin production batches, and cause costly delays. During outages, companies often rely on expensive diesel generators, reducing profits by as much as 8 percent annually.

A new guarantee from the World Bank Group Guarantee Platform for CrossBoundary Energy Holdings is helping change that story by reducing investment risks for up to 100 clean energy projects across 20 countries and turning a continent-wide challenge into a growth opportunity.

The Cost of Unreliable Electricity in Africa

Every power disruption—whether a power cut or a “brownout” caused by poor-quality electricity—creates ripples that undermine productivity and business resilience. Assembly lines halt, cell phone networks fail, and food spoils. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, unreliable electricity costs companies an estimated 2.1 percent of their total economic output annually. Over 75 percent of firms in the region experience frequent outages, averaging eight times per month and lasting over five hours. Even when power stays on, poor voltage quality forces businesses to reduce operating hours, pause production, or switch to less energy-intensive processes to protect their machinery.

The economic costs of brownouts, blackouts, and insufficient power supply in Africa are substantial and multifaceted, affecting GDP, business productivity, employment, and public finances. Below is a comprehensive synthesis of World Bank findings and data on this topic, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Power outages and unreliable electricity supply cost Sub-Saharan African economies an estimated 1–4% of GDP each year, and reduce individuals’ likelihood of employment by 35–41 percentage points. In Nigeria, economic losses from unreliable electricity reach 5–7% of GDP, disproportionately impacting micro, small, and medium enterprises. Tanzania and Uganda lose about 4% and 3.3% of GDP, respectively.

While solar panels, battery systems, and other renewables offer a more stable and affordable solutions, investors have been reluctant to fund projects across multiple African countries due to political and currency risks.

One Guarantee, 100 Projects: A Framework for Scalable Investment

This is where the World Bank Group Guarantee Platform offers an innovative solution. Traditional guarantees require extensive due diligence for each project—a time-consuming process for companies managing hundreds of small clean energy investments. The new portfolio-based approach streamlines the process by providing CrossBoundary Energy with a single framework guarantee covering around 100 projects across up to 20 African countries over 15 years. By addressing transfer restrictions and currency inconvertibility risks under one agreement, the guarantee enables CBE to scale up investments more efficiently—without renegotiating insurance for every new project.

“This is our first platform guarantee for distributed commercial and industrial renewables in Africa,” says Hiroshi Matano, Executive Vice President of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), home of the Guarantee Platform. “These projects will expand access to reliable and cost-effective power for businesses, stimulating economic growth, and job creation in the region.”

That structure is already attracting private lenders. Standard Bank is arranging up to $300 million in senior debt, praising the guarantee's ability to “unlock long-term commercial bank financing” for a historically underserved market.

“MIGA’s support at a portfolio level will allow us to expand our provision of these power solutions across Africa and support our clients in markets that might otherwise be underserved,” says Matthew Tilleard, CBE Co-Founder and Managing Partner.

In short, the portfolio-based guarantee structure transforms multiple small clean-energy projects into a single, bankable, continent-wide pipeline.

Beyond changing how renewable energy projects are guaranteed, the MIGA-CBE partnership aims to unlock opportunities for women across Africa’s energy sector. As part of this guarantee, MIGA is supporting the expansion of CBE’s capacity to scale gender analysis and actions across its operations by conducting diagnostics, developing action plans, and tracking progress to address barriers to women’s participation in energy jobs.

From Malls to Mines: Energizing Africa’s Industrial Backbone

Renewable energy projects create more jobs per unit of energy over their lifetime than fossil fuel alternatives. By targeting manufacturing centers, telecommunications networks, and food processing corridors, the guarantee advances the World Bank Group's jobs agenda. CBE’s awarded portfolio—now exceeding 500 MW—spans remote mines to busy malls, each with unique energy challenges:

• Tema, Ghana. Frequent power outages once forced large consumer goods manufacturers to rely on costly backup generators. CBE's 1 MWp solar installation now provides clean, reliable power, reducing costs and ensuring uninterrupted operations.

• Freetown, Sierra Leone. Engineers building the city’s first 5G mobile network faced voltage drops that shut down cell towers, stalling mobile-money trades and slowing the digital economy. CBE’s solar-and-battery systems now keep towers running 99.9 percent of the time, supporting Sierra Leone’s digital ambitions.

• Nakuru, Kenya. Cement and manufacturing plants struggled with production delays due to outages and voltage fluctuations that disrupted everything from kilns to packaging lines. At one such plant, CBE’s solar installation powers operations, reduces emissions, and helps achieve peak renewable output earlier each day—cutting costs and the carbon footprint of every bag of cement.

These examples reflect a broader impact: up to 11 World Bank IDA countries, four of which are fragile states, will benefit from this guarantee: Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Mali, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia. So will nine additional markets: Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Eswatini, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa.

A Blueprint for 300 million Connections

Reliable, high-quality, and affordable electricity is more than a development target—it powers competitive industry, resilient communities, and quality jobs. By bundling 100 projects under a single framework, MIGA and CBE have replaced fragmented efforts with a continent-wide plan—one that keeps factories running, cell towers online, and cold-storage systems working.

This innovative guarantee structure also offers a model for scale under Mission 300, the World Bank Group’s initiative to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030. While distributed renewable energy systems primarily serve businesses, they can also reduce pressure on national grids and free up capacity for households, amplifying the impact.