Africa Power Colloquium

For a number of decades, Africa’s power sector has faced serious challenges. Most African countries have insufficient, unreliable and costly electricity generation capacity and networks. As a consequence, economic growth rates have suffered and not enough of the continent’s people have enjoyed the benefits of access to modern energy services. Two in three Africans still do not have an electricity connection.

The response to these challenges has been a series of institutional reforms: state-owned monopoly utilities have been unbundled in a number of countries, private sector participation has been introduced and new regulatory authorities have been established. Despite this; Sub-Sahara Africa still produces as much electricity as one European country; Spain. State-owned power utilities still remain dominant, but increasingly we see the introduction of private sector participation in the form of IPPs (independent power producers), Prof. Anthon Eberhard of the University of Cape Town told delegates at the Africa Power Colloquium.

The learning and knowledge-sharing initiative was hosted by the Management Programme in Infrastructure Reform and Regulation at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business Management.  The Management Program in Infrastructure Reform has for the past three years coordinated a Peer Review Learning Network for six of Africa’s electricity regulatory agencies in Namibia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. The objective has been to assess performance across a representative sample of African countries and to see what can be learned and shared so that the power sectors contributes more positively to economic growth and development. Norway supported both phases of the project which involved taking CEOs to visit the designated countries where they did an in-depth assessment of the regulatory methodologies, decisions, decision-making processes and governance arrangements of the regulatory agencies in each of these countries. Findings and recommendations were subsequently presented to the boards and senior managements of these agencies. These reviews also laid the grounds for a remarkable learning opportunity were the CEOs could share experiences and provide detailed examples, from their own organisations.

The aim of the conference in Cape Town was to share the insights gathered in these peer reviews in order to improve the performance of the power sector, in particular regulation, in Africa. Those attending included energy ministers, senior officials, heads of regulatory agencies, heads of utilities, representatives from regional regulatory associations, development finance institutions, and grant agencies, as well as educationalists, trainers and researchers in the field of energy regulation. The Norwegian Embassy financially supported this important conference and Norway’s Ambassador to South Africa Mr. Tor Christian Hildan and Embassy Climate Change Counsellor Tim Lund contributed to the conference programme.

You can find the conference program here.

At the Africa Power Colloquium: Ambassador Mr. Tor Christian Hildan in conversation with South Africa's Minister in The Presidency National Planning Commission, Mr. Trevor Manual. Embassy of Norway's Climate Change Counsellor Tim Lund to the left.