One market, one grid: what the Third AfSEM Forum in Accra told us about sequencing Africa’s electricity integration

At the Third AfSEM Forum in Accra, the EU-funded Continental Energy Programme in Africa set out a single argument: planning, functional market rules and partnerships have to advance together, not one after the other. Two completed interconnector pre-feasibility studies show what that looks like in practice.

Africa is not short of energy resources. What it is short of is integrated markets capable of attracting investment at scale. That gap — between resource potential and investable market — framed the discussion at the Third AfSEM Forum, convened by the African Union Commission in partnership with the Association of Power Utilities of Africa (APUA) in Accra, Ghana.

The Continental Energy Programme in Africa (CEPA), funded by the European Union under the Global Gateway Investment Strategy, took part in the strategic dialogue on the future of the African Single Electricity Market (AfSEM) for the period 2027–2030. Its contribution rested on one proposition: infrastructure preparation and market design are not sequential tasks. They are two halves of the same job, and treating them as a queue is one of the reasons continental integration has moved more slowly than the ambition behind it.

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Infrastructure: from concept note to prepared project

On the infrastructure side, the first two interconnector pre-feasibility studies supported under CEPA have been completed and validated: Burundi (Jiji–Mulembwe) – Tanzania (Kigoma) at 220 kV, and DRC (Inga) – Angola (Soyo) at 400 kV. Both were drawn from the list of priority interconnection projects agreed with the regional power pools, and both were selected for their regional rather than purely national character. Further studies are in preparation.

These studies matter less as documents than as a change in project status. A pre-feasibility study moves a project from an idea that a power pool has flagged to a proposition a financier can actually assess — with demand forecasts, grid modelling, an economic analysis and an indicative financing plan attached. That is the point at which development finance institutions and detailed feasibility work can meaningfully step in.

The less visible half of the work

Alongside the infrastructure track sits work that generates far fewer photographs and is at least as decisive for mobilising public and private finance: harmonised grid codes, common methodologies for transmission and wheeling tariffs, standardised model power purchase agreements, and stronger regional regulators.

Without these, a well-prepared interconnector is still a project without a market to sell into. Investors do not price a transmission line in isolation; they price the rules that determine whether power can be traded across it, on what terms, and with what recourse if something goes wrong. Regulatory harmonisation is, in that sense, part of the capital structure of every cross-border project on the continent.

Where the Master Plan and the market meet

The lesson from Accra is that the two tracks are inseparable. The Continental Power System Master Plan (CMP), developed under the leadership of AUDA-NEPAD, tells the continent where to build. AfSEM creates the market conditions that make building there commercially viable. Neither delivers on its own, and both are supported through the same programme precisely so that they can be advanced in step.

Three priorities for the next phase

Looking to AfSEM implementation over 2027–2030, three priorities emerged from the discussion in Accra:

• a continental pipeline of investment-ready generation and transmission projects;
• regulatory harmonisation, so that investors see one increasingly integrated African market rather than many fragmented ones;
• partnerships robust enough to carry projects from plan to construction.

The Forum brought together the African Union Commission, APUA, AUDA-NEPAD, AFREC, the regional power pools and regional regulators. The quality of that convening — technical, candid and forward-looking — is itself part of what makes the third priority achievable.