Africa’s Just Energy Transition Demands Clearer Commitments, Not Experimental Distractions

The global conversation around energy transition is entering a decisive phase. While the rhetoric around net-zero and climate resilience has intensified, the pace and equity of delivery remain deeply uneven. In Africa, where more than 600 million people still lack access to reliable electricity, a just transition requires more than clean technology, it demands governance transformation, financial reform, and institutional accountability. Civil society organizations (CSOs) across the continent are advancing alternative models that center local ownership, resilience, and dignity. But their momentum is threatened by fragmented finance, opaque partnerships, and growing interest in speculative technologies like solar radiation modification (SRM).

In Ghana, climate variability is not a future threat, it is a lived reality. Seventy-four percent (74%) of farmers report delayed rainfall onset; over 60% have experienced shortened growing seasons. The country is already seeing a 10–20% decline in maize yields, driven by erratic weather and prolonged dry spells. In this context, proposals to deploy solar geoengineering to reflect sunlight and artificially cool the planet raise serious questions. Who decides whether to test such technologies over Africa? What accountability exists for unintended impacts on rainfall or biodiversity? These questions remain unanswered, even as discussions on SRM accelerate in academic and policy circles, largely outside African institutions and constituencies.

The AbibiNsroma Foundation, in collaboration with FIDEP Foundation, recently convened a stakeholder engagement and technical workshop to examine global and regional best practices in energy transitions. The forum emphasized scalable community-based energy solutions with inclusive governance and financing reforms.

One of the workshop's central findings is that just financing approaches must be restructured to support decarbonization without undermining national sovereignty or imposing rigid donor-driven timelines. African governments require flexible, long-term fiscal tools, particularly grants, guarantees, concessional loans aligned with national development priorities. Current flows tell a different story. Africa still receives less than 5% of global climate finance, despite contributing just 3% of global emissions.

Models that work already exist. In Kenya, the M-KOPA solar initiative has provided affordable, pay-as-you-go solar kits to over 1 million off-grid households, backed by inclusive financing and mobile technology. In the case of Ghana, the Energy Commission’s Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) program has piloted clean cooking and mini-grid projects with strong community input. These are not isolated success stories, they are blueprints for scaling a just transition that is socially owned, economically viable, and environmentally sound.

Just Transition serves as a foundation for pathways that break away from extractive and debt-dependent models, while ensuring that workers and Indigenous Peoples are meaningfully involved in decision-making and fully protected throughout the transition.

Policymakers must act on three fronts. First, financing mechanisms such as the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) must move beyond headline pledges and deliver predictable, unconditional support that empowers national planning agencies and CSOs. Second, regional institutions like the African Union and ECOWAS must champion a governance framework for emerging technologies that prioritizes precaution, transparency, and African agency. Third, governments must enshrine community ownership and local job creation into national energy strategies, not as a side benefit but as a central objective.

There is no pathway to a sustainable energy future that excludes those most affected by climate impacts. Nor can innovation be defined solely by technological novelty while overlooking the democratic legitimacy of its deployment. Strategic investments in decentralized renewables, integrated with agriculture, water, and local livelihoods, can drive deep decarbonization while delivering measurable gains in equity and stability.

Just Transition dimensions of transitioning away from fossil fuels, advancing agriculture and deploying renewable energies, including managing demand for transition minerals, and the role of public services and social protection in advancing Just Transition strategies

Global institutions must now ask themselves: will energy transition financing support the realities on the ground, or will it continue to flow through structures that reproduce dependency and fragmentation?