Creating the Regulatory and Tech Rails for Private Energy Investment in Southern Africa
Southern Africa is resource-rich by any measure, yet Africa attracts under two per cent of global renewable energy investment. The gap has rarely been about resources. It has been about the machinery that allows private capital to price risk, contract, and be paid. This roundtable is designed as a working conversation using Zimbabwe as the concrete case for a broader Southern African question: what regulatory and technological groundwork needs to be laid before private capital will move into the region's power sector at scale?
In the most recent National Electrification Strategy from the Zimbabwean Government, it is estimated that 41 per cent of the population has access to electricity, against 62 per cent recorded in the 2022 census. This is a gap the National Energy Compact attributes to connections failing to keep pace with household formation and a growing demographic. National installed generation capacity is 2,962 MW, however dependable capacity runs between 1,200 MW and 1,600 MW against peak demand of about 2,000 MW. This shortfall has been bridged through imports and load-shedding, which The World Bank has estimated is costing the Government 6.1 per cent of GDP.
Nonetheless, the utility reported a run of 138 consecutive days without load-shedding earlier this year, held supply through the winter peak and is targeting an end to load-shedding and, subsequently, to imports. That is a real achievement. It is also a managed one, sustained by regional trading through the Southern African Power Pool and by import cover, hence the structural gap between dependable capacity and demand has not yet closed.
To solve this, Zimbabwe's National Energy Compact aims to lift power capacity to 5,432 MW by 2030, costing about $9.13 billion, with private investors covering 90%. Renewable energy is set to more than double, from 1,282 MW to 2,640 MW, while the country pushes for full electricity access through 1.9 million new grid connections and 1.2 million off-grid ones. To attract investment, Zimbabwe is opening its electricity market to private companies, introducing competitive bidding, and expanding rules like net metering, which let small-scale solar producers sell surplus power back to the grid.
What is not resolved is bankability, and the National Energy Compacts states that the regulator had licensed unsolicited private projects totalling 7,130 MW, worth roughly US$11 billion, of which most have not reached financial close, mainly because of risk. Seven gigawatts licensed and largely unfinanced is the sharpest available statement of the problem. A licence is not an offtake. An offtake is not a settlement guarantee. And a settlement guarantee denominated in local currency is not the instrument a foreign investor underwrites.
This session aims to get specific and will be an honest conversation among policy makers, power exchange agencies, investors and developers on what it will take to ensure the regulatory and technological conditions for increased mobilisation of private capital in the African renewable energy sector. It is not another resource inventory — but a stress-test of what actually unlocks private capital for renewable energy development in Southern Africa.