Launched in April 2024, Mission 300 is an initiative spearheaded by the World Bank Group (WBG) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) that aims to connect 300 million people to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030.
Mission 300 risks becoming yet another development finance initiative for Africa that reproduces the structures, dependencies and inequities of an international financial system that is completely dysfunctional. It is clear that a combination of reliance on private finance and prohibitively high interest rates is driving a global system that funnels money out of the countries that need it most into the pockets of the wealthiest. In 2023, private capital recouped $68 billion more in interest and principal loan repayments than it lent to developing countries, while international financial institutions and assistance agencies collected a further $40 billion. The net concessional assistance from international financial organisations was just $2 billion. Rather than enabling sustainable development and industrialisation, this financial architecture reinforces patterns of subordination and dependency
Recommendations
- No More Double Standards: Mission 300: alongside other multilateral climate finance initiatives, must halt financial flows into fossil fuels. Locking Africa into fossil fuel production and consumption is not a route to energy access or sustainable development. The WBG and AfDB must introduce explicit guidelines on investments under the Mission 300 that include a robust and thorough fossil fuel exclusion policy, including Financial Intermediary Funds and their subprojects. This must also be applied to technical assistance, which often creates the prefigurative conditions for fossil fuel infrastructures and development trajectories that favour fossil fuels, especially gas.
- By Africans, For Africans: Mission 300 must prioritise inclusive and transparent processes that ensure the agency of affected communities. The initiative should also pioneer forms of public and community ownership over energy generation and transmission networks to ensure electricity is a public good rather than a source of private profit pulled out of the continent.
- Challenge the Centrality of Private Finance: Mission 300 risks repeating an outdated and failing approach to development that centres the needs of private finance over that of African communities. The international financial system is highly dysfunctional, pulling capital out of the countries that need it most into the pockets of the wealthiest. By fundamentally reassessing its approach, Mission 300 has the potential to foster sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond it. Private investment would not be excluded but would rather be guided into stable investment by a public company through, for example, competitive direct procurement auctions.
- Grants and Highly Concessional Finance: If Mission 300 does not prioritise grant-based and highly concessional finance, it will only add to African states’ debt distress rather than remedy it. A just energy transition is vital, and many of its most-needed elements require grants or highly concessional finance. This includes energy access, 100% renewable-ready grids, communityowned projects, fossil fuel worker and community support, and electrified public transportation. It remains to be seen whether grant-based financial mechanisms will be delivered through Mission 300, which would enhance the initiative’s potential impact and contribution to increasing energy access in sub-Saharan Africa. Grant-based and concessional public finance has a vital role to play in a sustainable renewable energy model for Africa, and MDBs should deploy their limited public funds to support a just energy transition for energy access in Africa.
- Strategic Investments over Export Push: Mission 300 is an opportunity to integrate industrial strategy to accelerate green industrialisation across the continent. This strategic pivot is particularly apposite at a time of major upheaval in patterns of international trade with the introduction of US tariffs on export-led countries, many of which are located in subSaharan Africa and which stand poised to face heavy barriers to the USA, a key export market.
- Transparent and Accountable Terms and Processes: Establishing high environmental, social and governance standards in emergent sectors such as the critical minerals and rare earths extractive sectors will be especially important if African workers and governments are to realise the returns from the boom in demand for the fundamental components of the global transition to renewable energy sources. Failure to do so will reproduce the historic patterns of exploitation in Africa’s extractive sectors whereby labour and human rights abuses are perpetuated on African workers with frequent impunity.
Excerpt of: Mission 300: A step change for Africa? (Power Shift Africa 2025)