How Western climate policy is leaving Africa in the dark
When I lived in Somalia as a young boy, power outages were routine. As the sun went down, you could hear generators turning on across the neighborhoods, one after another, as people tried to keep the lights on, keep food cold, and keep businesses running. Diesel generators weren’t symbols of excess. They were the last line between functionality and darkness.
That experience stays with you.
So when I hear wealthy institutions in Geneva, New York, and Davos speak casually about “transitioning away” from ‘fossil fuels’ in Africa, I don’t hear abstract policy.
I hear those generators… and I hear what happens when they’re no longer allowed to exist.
Africa is where global electrification stalled
For decades, global electrification followed a simple and hopeful pattern: every decade ended with fewer people living without electricity than it began. That pattern has now fractured.
According to the UN-backed Tracking SDG7 data, the world has made enormous progress in electrifying Asia and much of Latin America. Africa, by contrast, has barely moved.
Source: https://www.seforall.org/system/files/2025-12/SEforALL%20SDG7_TRACKING_2025-data_analysis.pdf
Sustainable Energy for All, a UN-aligned organization, summarizes it bluntly:
“Africa is stagnant.” — SEforALL SDG7 Tracking Report https://www.seforall.org/publications
From 2010 to 2025, Africa reduced the number of people without electricity by only a few million — gains that were largely erased by population growth. In practical terms, the continent has been pushing hard to stand still.
This is not a technological failure. It is not a lack of resources. It is the result of policy choices.
This decade already went backwards
Even more troubling, the current decade has already produced a historic reversal.
After decades of steady improvement, 2022 saw a slight increase in the global number of people without access to electricity… the first reversal in modern records.
The International Energy Agency acknowledges that this was driven overwhelmingly by sub-Saharan Africa.
From the IEA’s own commentary:
“….the number of people without access to electricity has remained largely unchanged since 2020.” — IEA https://www.iea.org/commentaries/access-to-electricity-stagnates-leaving-globally-730-million-in-the-dark
Today, roughly 87 percent of the world’s unelectrified population lives in sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: https://www.seforall.org/system/files/2025-12/SEforALL%20SDG7_TRACKING_2025-data_analysis.pdf
Read that again. The world is electrifying… and the remaining darkness is being concentrated into one continent.
“Just use renewables” is not a development strategy
The standard response from Western institutions is always the same: Africa should leapfrog straight to wind and solar. That sounds compassionate. It is not serious.
Modern economies are built on dense, dispatchable energy. Hospitals, desalination plants, fertilizer production, steelmaking, refrigeration, data networks… none of these function reliably on intermittent power alone.
Every country that has escaped poverty did so using fuels that could deliver energy on demand.
In Somalia, solar panels helped charge phones and run lights. They did not stabilize grids. They did not replace generators. When the power went out, diesel was the difference between darkness and functionality.
Africa is being told it must industrialize without the tools every wealthy country used… and continues to use.
The institutional fingerprints are unmistakable
This outcome did not emerge by accident. At COP26, governments and development institutions signed the Glasgow Statement, committing to:
“Shift public finance away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy.” — COP26 Glasgow Statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Statement
That commitment now shapes lending criteria at multilateral development banks, export-credit agencies, and climate-finance institutions.
Analysts have noted the consequence plainly:
“The majority of Western funding institutions have pledged to stop financing fossil fuel projects overseas.” — Energy for Growth Hub (via World Economic Forum)
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/03/genuine-climate-justice-means-allowing-sub-saharan-africa-to-access-to-global-carbon-budget/
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has gone even further, calling on financial institutions to:
“Stop taking on new fossil-fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones.” — UN remarks, reported by Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/un-chief-rebukes-fossil-fuel-industry-supporters-climate-records-break-2024-06-05/
The World Economic Forum routinely frames the “end of the fossil fuel age” as inevitable, without distinguishing between wealthy nations with surplus power and countries where millions still lack electricity.
No one needs to say “Africa must remain poor.” They simply remove the financing that would allow Africa not to be.
A prediction — and a moral test
Here is a clear, falsifiable prediction:
If current climate-finance rules remain in place, Africa will end this decade with roughly the same number of people without electricity as it began it… or more.
That would mark the first decade in modern history where global electrification stalls not because of scarcity, but because of ideology. If that happens, the moral authority of Western climate institutions should be finished.
Because restricting energy access in the name of climate virtue is not symbolic harm. It is measurable. It is preventable. And it is deadly.
Why “green colonialism” is the correct term
Colonialism once extracted labor and resources. ‘Green’ colonialism extracts choice. It tells poor countries that the energy path used by every wealthy nation is now forbidden… not because it doesn’t work, but because it offends modern sensibilities formed far from energy scarcity.
If Western societies are serious about reckoning with their treatment of the developing world, this is where that reckoning begins… not with virtue signaling, but with electricity.
See more here substack.com
Header image: African Demystifier
Some bold empahsis added
Editor’s note: how much this is a deliberate policy is highlighted by this quote from Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund: “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method