The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) offers governments an opportunity to harmonise and leverage the continent’s energy resources to provide electricity to more than 600 million Africans without access to power, a United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) official said.
“AfCFTA gives us the scale to stop selling our resources and start building our industries. Harmonised trade can turn 54 fragmented markets into one energy market for 1.4 billion people,” UNECA Economic Affairs Officer Dr. Marit Kitaw said at the Future of Energy Conference in Accra, organised by the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP).
Kitaw said African countries should plan energy systems not only around consumption but also around production, adding that universal access to electricity alone would not create jobs, factories or resilient value chains.
“Affordable, reliable and scalable power is the backbone of industrial transformation,” she said.
She said aligning standards, tariffs and infrastructure under the AfCFTA could help attract long-term investment in regional value chains, cross-border power pools and local manufacturing.
Africa also needs regulatory harmonisation, predictable tariffs, streamlined transit rules and coordinated grid planning to ensure electricity and clean energy inputs can reach areas where industries need them most, she said.
“Energy policy cannot be siloed. It must be integrated with mineral beneficiation, trade policy, logistics corridors and skills development,” Kitaw said.
She said a just energy and minerals transition should include local-content requirements, technology transfer and social safeguards to ensure communities benefit from new factories and jobs.
Kitaw also said the AfCFTA could provide the market certainty sought by investors, but African governments needed to reduce non-tariff barriers and invest in transmission and energy storage to make large-scale industrial power projects viable.
Ghana’s Finance Minister, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, who also attended the conference, backed the call for greater integration of energy and trade policy.
“We cannot industrialise as islands; AfCFTA is our factory floor. Reliable power, bold investment and market unity will turn Africa’s raw potential into jobs, factories and prosperity,” Forson said.
He said agreements alone would not create trade and called for credible public-private partnerships, blended finance, local-currency instruments and deeper capital markets to mobilise the investment needed to support industrialisation.
Fiscal discipline and clear investment pipelines were also essential to attract private capital, he said.
Forson said Ghana was scaling up electricity generation capacity and developing industrial clusters to link energy supply more directly to manufacturing opportunities across the region.
“We must also reduce trade costs and harmonise standards so goods, services and energy cross borders without needless delay,” he said.
Discover more from Energy News Africa
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.