The Private Sector Development Programme has five components: the Business Enabling Environment Programme (BEEP), the Malawi Oilseeds Sector Transformation Programme (MOST), the Business Innovation Facility (BIF), and the Malawi Innovation Challenge Fund (MICF) and the Monitoring and Evaluation component. The first four programmes were hampered in some way by external factors during the year under review, including a near total rain failure during the 2015/2016 cultivation season, power shortages that resulted in daily blackouts lasting up to 16 hours.

The AfSEM aims at connecting the Continent’s energy strategies and action plans by harmonising regulatory frameworks and integrating generation, transmission, and distribution master plans. This will allow for the diversification of energy sources supporting energy transition, better trade and investments exchanges, and close the energy infrastructure gaps between regions and countries.

The goal is to build one of the largest electricity markets in the world, covering the African Union's 55 Member States, and a population of more than 1.3 billion.

The CHOICES (Community and Household Options In Choosing Energy Services) project in South Africa's Eastern Cape sought to enable communities to make sustainable energy choices that reduced energy poverty and stimulated local development. The project focused on building local people's capacity to participate in identifying and exploring locally appropriate energy options with greater community benefits. 

Universal energy access is one of the driving forces in alleviating poverty and ensuring sustainable and inclusive economic growth. The IEA World Energy Outlook, however, shows that close to 600 million people remain without access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. This number rose in 2020 due to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, reversing progress observed in recent years. A delayed recovery would see the number of individuals without access to electricity increase from almost 600 to 630 million by 2030.

“An Affordable and Sustainable Energy System for Sub-Saharan Africa” (Energy Sub-Saharan Africa) is a 4-year (2019-2023) programme funded by the European Union that is designed to support the aspirations of selected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to improve their energy data management and long-term energy planning.

The EAC Regional Strategy on Scaling-Up Access to Modern Energy Services aims to increase access to modern energy services by adopting High Impact, Low Cost scalable approaches. It addresses four key targets that are key to poverty reduction and sustainable development in line with the 7th UN Sustainable Development Goal. The four targets include:

Globally, more than 800 million people still live without electricity and about 3 billion people lack access to clean cooking solutions. This has a dramatic impact on social development, economic opportunities, health, education and the environment. EnDev’s involvement focuses on providing access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy as a means to deliver social, economic, and environmental change.

The development of infrastructure in Africa is an integral part of the African Union (AU) Agenda 2063. The Agenda aims to achieve inclusive socio-economic development, which requires adequate electricity infrastructure at the continental, regional, national and local levels, including rural areas. Electricity is a prerequisite for economic development, and it improves social infrastructure such as health, education and financial services.

The energy sector in Africa still faces huge challenges that include low generation capacity and efficiency, high costs, unstable and unreliable energy supplies and low access rates, amongst others. These challenges have adversely affected socio-economic development on the continent. With the demand for modern energy consistently on the rise, there critical need to address policy, investment, markets and technical barriers to energy sector development on the continent.

Climate change is causing unprecedented variations in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events: floods, droughts and heatwaves. How African countries prepare for and manage these extreme events would be fundamental to the performance of their economies and realisation of their development aspirations as embodied in various national development plans, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.