Kenya and World Bank–backed COMESA brought more than 400 public- and private-sector energy leaders to Lusaka from 22–26 September 2025 for the first Accelerating Sustainable and Clean Energy Access Transformation (ASCENT) Week, to decide how Eastern and Southern Africa will close energy access gaps for over 100 million people by mobilizing an initial US$5 billion, plus a further US$10 billion, through a regional programme anchored by a US$50 million COMESA platform and digital monitoring tools.
The value of the ASCENT week is the operating model it sets in motion. ASCENT is structured as a multi-country programme spanning more than 20 states, with COMESA providing a “Regional Energy Access Acceleration Platform” that gives governments technical assistance, common data standards and a way to track delivery across utilities, regulators and off-grid actors. In plain terms, it offers ministries a shared playbook and a dashboard, so a rural electrification agency in Malawi and a utility in Zambia are not solving the same problem twice or buying incompatible systems. Senior COMESA officials framed the week as a pivot from isolated projects to regionally compatible pipelines that can absorb development finance and private capital at speed.
The need is acute and measurable. In 2023, around 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still had no electricity access, four in five of the world’s unelectrified, despite a modest rebound after the pandemic setbacks. Access deficits remain concentrated in Eastern and Southern Africa’s low-income economies, where grid expansion is costly and incomes thin. Clean cooking is an even bigger health and climate issue: sub-Saharan Africa’s reliance on charcoal and wood contributes to roughly 815,000 premature deaths each year and accelerates deforestation around fast-growing cities. Any serious access programme must therefore pair electrons with clean-cooking fuels and appliances; ASCENT’s design acknowledges that reality by convening utilities alongside ministries of energy, rural agencies and private distributors.
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Country baselines illustrate the spread. Kenya’s access has climbed to about 76% on the latest World Bank series, helped by last-mile grid roll-outs and solar-home systems, but pockets of the arid north still lag. Zambia sits near the halfway mark overall, about 51% in 2023, with rural access trailing far behind urban centers. Malawi’s system is among the most constrained, with access around 16% and a generation mix still vulnerable to hydrological shocks. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the electrification rate remains below 20% and the absolute number of people without power approaches 77 million, an access deficit larger than many countries’ entire populations. ASCENT’s promise will be judged by whether these gaps narrow in places where the economics are hardest.
The programme’s practicality lies in how it threads national projects into regional systems. Power pools and cross-border lines turn stranded capacity into tradable supply. The Kenya–Tanzania interconnector, energized in late 2024 with 1.5 GW capability, allows surplus geothermal or hydropower to move north–south within the Eastern Africa Power Pool. The Zambia–Tanzania–Kenya (ZTK) interconnector was relaunched in 2025 with backing from the World Bank, EU and UK, signaling political will to complete the missing links between the Southern African and Eastern pools. When such lines are live, drought-hit systems can import rather than shed load, and new renewables in one country can serve customers in another.
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Market plumbing matters as much as steel in the ground. The Southern African Power Pool’s wholesale market has been scaling traded volumes and tightening price discovery, a signal that utilities view cross-border purchases as part of their normal dispatch, not a last resort. Angola’s latent surplus, about 3,000 MW above peak demand, illustrates what interconnections can unlock for neighbors still running diesel and suffering from chronic deficits. ASCENT’s regional lens lines up with these dynamics by helping countries prioritize investments that maximize trade and resilience, rather than building isolated megawatts that cannot move across borders.
Access will not be solved by grids alone, and the mini-grid data are clarifying. The latest State of the Global Mini-Grids Market report counts roughly 72 operational mini-grids in Zambia and 36 in Kenya captured in one core database, with installed capacities in the single-digit megawatts but outsized impact on clinics, schools and rural enterprises. The report’s bottom-up analysis shows installations climbing steadily and investor interest diversifying, but also stresses the need for predictable tariffs, performance-based grants and integration with national planning. ASCENT’s promise to harmonize standards and digitize monitoring is directly responsive to those constraints.
A practical example shows what success could look like. Malawi’s Mpatamanga hydropower project, backed by a recent US$350 million World Bank grant within a US$1.5 billion public-private package, will add 358 MW and is expected to connect over a million new households by 2030. On its own, that plant cannot guarantee reliability if rainfall falters; paired with interconnectors and a pipeline of solar, storage and mini-grids, it can support steady urban supply while freeing scarce public funds to extend last-mile networks and underwrite clean-cooking transitions in peri-urban settlements. This is precisely the systems view ASCENT says it will champion.
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Resilience to climate volatility is the other test. The Kariba drought’s impact on Zambia’s hydropower in 2024–2025, rolling blackouts, emergency diesel and stressed balance sheets, made clear that single-source dependence is a macro-risk. Regional power trade, diversified generation, and the ability to surge off-grid supply quickly are not academic concepts; they are the difference between factories idling and shifts running. If ASCENT can shorten procurement cycles, align standards and reduce the cost of capital for distributed renewables, it will translate a week of panels into visible hours of power on shopfloors from Chipata to Chimoio.
The World Bank’s energy practice in Eastern and Southern Africa is already deploying blended instruments for distributed renewables and mini-grids; COMESA’s platform gives those tools a regional chassis. The test over the next 12–18 months is whether ministries use the ASCENT rail to standardize tenders, publish bankable pipelines and report outcomes transparently. If they do, financiers have room to scale, households see connections advance beyond urban cores, and clean-cooking initiatives pick up speed alongside electricity access. ASCENT Week set that direction; delivery will confirm it.
Source: COMESA
