Africa must step up investment in energy to power real growth

Africa remains severely under-electrified, particularly across most of sub-Saharan Africa. According to the World Health Organisation, over 700 million people across the globe have no access to electricity and nearly eight out of ten of those live in Africa.

If you exclude South Africa, with its higher level of installed (albeit regularly stressed) capacity, one billion people living across 48 African countries have roughly the same access to installed electricity capacity as Germany's population of 83 million, states the International Energy Agency (IEA).