The Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet have more than doubled their commitment to electricity access in Africa, crossing the $100 million funding mark for the World Bank and African Development Bank (AfDB)-backed Mission 300 initiative aimed at connecting 300 million Africans to power by the end of the decade.

The latest pledge, a leap from an initial $10 million commitment made 19 months ago, underscored a growing global consensus that access to electricity remains central to poverty reduction across sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 85 per cent of the world’s 730 million people without electricity reside.

The announcement was made at the Powering Africa Summit in Washington, where Rockefeller President, Rajiv Shah, described the foundation’s deepening involvement as a defining investment in global development.

“The Rockefeller Foundation has made its biggest-ever bet on connecting people to electricity as the single best pathway out of large-scale poverty,” he said.

The funding is jointly structured, with about 47 per cent contributed by the Rockefeller Foundation and its public charity arm, RF Catalytic Capital, while the remaining 53 per cent comes from the Global Energy Alliance. The capital is being deployed across 23 countries, including Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Mozambique.

Mission 300, launched in April 2024 by the World Bank and African Development Bank, has secured National Energy Compacts with 30 countries, outlining investment priorities and policy reforms required to expand access. Since its inception, about 44 million people across the continent have been connected to electricity, with projections indicating that tens of millions more could gain access by 2026.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, about 70 per cent of households still rely on charcoal or firewood for cooking, a practice linked to respiratory illnesses and deforestation.

In response, the alliance has launched the Clean Cooking Accelerator Initiative and is piloting a dedicated Clean Cooking Delivery Unit in Kenya, which could serve as a continental model for scaling access to cleaner alternatives.

For development finance stakeholders, the $100 million figure is less significant as a standalone investment and more as a catalyst to attract larger flows of capital.

Vice President at the African AfDB, Kevin Kariuki, said philanthropic funding is deliberately structured to mobilise much larger flows of public and private finance.

The initiative has already begun leveraging additional capital through programmes such as the World Bank’s DARES initiative in West and Central Africa and the African Development Bank’s Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa, both aimed at scaling renewable energy and grid expansion projects.

Chief executive officer of the Global Energy Alliance, Woochong Um, emphasised the economic dimension of electrification, noting that access to power is directly linked to income generation and productivity.

“New electricity connections translate into durable economic opportunities for people and communities,” he said, pointing to productive-use programmes as key to transforming infrastructure investments into sustainable livelihoods.