The World Bank has announced plans to allocate $5 billion to provide electricity to 100 million people in Africa by the end of the decade.
Access to electricity remains a pressing issue in several African nations, posing significant challenges to their development.
The revelation was made by World Bank President Ajay Banga in a speech at the midterm review of the $93 billion replenishment package for the International Development Association (IDA).
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According to Bloomberg, Banga used that goal as an illustration of how he intends to use money from the bank’s International Development Association, which lends money to low-income nations at zero or low interest rates, and the reason why donor nations must give aid.
During the next ten years, 1.1 billion young people in the Global South are anticipated to reach working age, he said in his remarks.
What the president said:
“But how can we hope to make even adequate progress while 600 million people in Africa – 36 million of whom live here in Tanzania – still don’t have access to reliable electricity? Put simply: We can’t.”
Banga addressed the bank’s ongoing review of its latest replenishment round for the IDA, amounting to $93 billion. He expressed his desire for donors to set another record in the upcoming round scheduled for December 2024.
“We are pushing the limits of this important concessional resource and no amount of creative financial engineering will compensate for the fact that we need more funding,” he said.
After attending the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, Banga, the former CEO of Mastercard Inc., landed in Zanzibar.
In a Sunday interview in Dubai, he reflected on the experience and said, “There’s a lot of energy.” There appears to be a political consensus. I plan to utilise every possible tailwind.
A significant section of the populace struggles with unreliable electricity across the continent. Numerous factors, such as the high cost of electricity and insufficient infrastructure, contribute to the lack of accessibility to electricity in many regions.
