Africa’s accelerating solar boom is creating a growing opportunity for insurers and reinsurers to provide the risk protection needed to unlock billions of dollars in private investment as governments and development institutions push to close the electricity access gap.
The call comes as Africa heads towards a record year for solar installations, with the continent expected to add about 17 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity in 2026, a 45% increase from the previous year, according to Ember, an energy think tank. The report’s release coincided with the International Solar Alliance (ISA) eighth Africa Regional Committee meeting. The meeting was held recently in Victoria Falls, taking place in Southern Africa for the first time.
The ISA is a global intergovernmental organisation launched by India and France at COP21 in 2015. With 120-plus members and signatory countries, ISA works with governments to improve energy access and security through solar, across agriculture, health, transport, and power generation.
The ISA meeting focused on financing, technical assistance, capacity building and country-level implementation of Africa’s solar priorities. The organisation also highlighted the operationalisation of the Africa Solar Facility as part of the meeting’s agenda.
The Victoria Falls meeting highlighted a wider shift in Africa’s solar market. The continent is no longer debating whether solar has a role to play in its energy future. Delegates were figuring out how quickly investment can be mobilised and how the risks can be structured so that private capital can participate at scale.
Ashish Khanna, director general, ISA, said Africa is ready to move from megawatts to gigawatts of solar, citing growing political will, greater alignment between governments and development partners, and declining costs of solar and storage technologies.
“The convergence of governments and development partners around Mission 300 provides an opportunity to accelerate energy access across the continent. ISA launched three Africa-focused platforms during the meeting: a continental clean energy plan for solarising Africa, designed as an implementation pathway rather than a report; an Africa Solar Facility that will operationalise a $200 million fund; and a programme under Mission 300 focused initially on the solarisation of agriculture,” said Khanna.
The growing solar market provides insurers and reinsurers with an opportunity to move beyond traditional asset protection. Zimbabwe is among the countries recording particularly rapid growth.
The expansion of solar is taking place as international institutions attempt to close Africa’s enormous electricity-access gap. But the scale of the investment required means public and development finance alone will not be enough.
According to AU commissioner for infrastructure and energy, Lerato Mataboge, 600 million Africans do not have access to electricity. Speaking at the ISA meeting, she said it means there is a need to expedite the provision of household electrification.
The World Bank and African Development Bank’s Mission 300 initiative aims to provide first-time electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030. By June 2026, the programme had already connected more than 50 million people across 40 countries, according to the World Bank.
“Reaching that ambition [to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030] will require not only public financing and policy reforms, but also a significant increase in private investment. The Africa Solar Facility has been created to help bridge that gap,” said Thomas Flochel, World Bank Group representative.
“This partnership brings together institutions with complementary strengths. As the platform’s architect and fund manager, Africa50 will leverage its infrastructure expertise to identify opportunities, deploy capital, and build a pipeline of commercially viable distributed renewable energy investments with strong development impact.”
With the patient capital facility, the World Bank provides concessional International Development Association (IDA) financing to improve risk-adjusted returns, mobilize private investment, and help the platform deliver its development goals with strong governance, transparency, environmental and social standards, and measurable impact.
“Together, we are creating the platform that can mobilise investment at scale and accelerate electrification across Africa. But its success will not be measured by the size of the fund or the number of agreements signed. It will be measured by the entrepreneur who can keep a business open after dark, by the health clinic that can provide better care, and by millions of people whose lives and opportunities will expand because energy has become accessible, reliable, and affordable,” said Flochel.
Reaffirming Zimbabwe’s commitment to advancing renewable energy, July Moyo, minister of Energy and Power Development, said, the government is recognising the vital role that solar energy can play in strengthening energy security, supporting economic growth and creating an enabling environment for investment. Moyo said one of Africa’s major problems is gaps in statistics, explaining that there are a lot of people using solar energy in both urban and rural communities but not registered in the database.
Solar projects, particularly decentralised systems such as mini-grids and commercial and industrial installations, can face risks that make investors and lenders cautious. These include political and regulatory changes, currency restrictions, payment defaults by electricity buyers, construction delays, equipment damage, extreme weather and other operational risks.
Maxwell Mugariwa, an energy and climate expert, said for insurers and reinsurers, this presents an opportunity to become part of the financing architecture behind Africa’s energy transition.
“Insurance cannot remove those risks, but it can transfer some of the financial consequences away from project developers, lenders and investors. That can make projects easier to finance,” he said.
While utility-scale solar plants can benefit from established project-finance structures, hundreds of smaller mini-grids and distributed renewable-energy projects can be more difficult to finance because of their size, and revenue structures. These risks can raise financing costs or make investors unwilling to enter markets that they consider too uncertain.
“A developer may have a technically viable project but still struggle to secure financing if lenders are uncertain about the ability of the electricity purchaser to pay over the life of the project,” said Mugariwa.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) has previously identified high actual or perceived public-counterparty risks as one of the factors discouraging private investment in African energy projects. The bank’s Africa Energy Guarantee Facility (AEGF) was established specifically to address this problem by supporting reinsurers in providing political and comprehensive credit-risk insurance for energy projects through local insurance partners.
The EIB said the AEGF was expected to support up to US$1.4 billion of clean-energy investment across Africa, demonstrating the potential leverage of insurance-backed risk mitigation.
The same principle is now emerging in the Africa Solar Facility (ASF) under the International Solar Alliance’s Global Solar Facility. The ASF is designed to raise about $200 million in capital, targeting more than 1.6GW of solar deployment and electricity access for around five million people.
The facility has received a $25 million commitment from the Government of India, alongside an expected $10 million to $15 million contribution from ISA as junior capital. The anchor investments are expected to mobilise up to $700 million from other sovereigns and development-finance institutions. Africa50 was selected as the investment manager.
Mugariwa said, for the insurance industry, the ASF is structured to use guarantees, insurance and technical assistance as part of its blended-finance approach to reduce investment risks and attract commercial capital. The facility is therefore not simply intended to provide money for solar projects. Its broader purpose is to change the risk profile of projects sufficiently to bring in additional investors.
At the Victoria Falls meeting, ISA also signed an extension of its memorandum of understanding with GOGLA, continuing their cooperation on decentralised solar solutions and expanding access to affordable and reliable energy across ISA Member Countries. The agreement includes work on market intelligence, policy, quality standards, local manufacturing and catalytic finance for off-grid solar.
“One of the biggest opportunities may lie in moving away from insuring individual projects towards portfolio-based risk protection. A single rural mini-grid may be too small to justify the cost of complex insurance and due diligence. But a portfolio containing dozens or hundreds of similar projects across several regions could create a more diversified risk pool,” said Mugariwa.
A major risk, among others, is political-risk insurance. Long-term energy projects depend heavily on government policy and the financial health of public utilities. Political-risk insurance can cover selected events such as currency inconvertibility and transfer restrictions, expropriation, breach of contract, political violence and certain forms of non-payment.
In Zimbabwe and any country, local insurers are likely to play an important role in bringing these products to African projects, but experts say reinsurers will be needed to provide additional capacity where individual exposures are too large. International reinsurers can help local insurance companies retain relationships with project developers while sharing larger exposures across international balance sheets.
During the regional committee meeting, ISA released its Solarising Africa strategy report, an implementation blueprint identifying four priority areas, distributed renewable energy, solarised agriculture, e-mobility and utility-scale solar to accelerate deployment. It outlines a pathway to scale solar capacity from the current 20–22 GW to 150–200 GW by 2030, 500 GW by 2040 and 1 TW by 2050, supported by finance, stronger institutions, skills and grids.
The President of Zimbabwe Emmerson Mnangagwa, addressing the meeting of the ISA Regional Committee for the Africa Region in Victoria Falls, said that the Zimbabwean government remains deeply committed to advancing Africa’s critical role in the global energy transition agenda.
“Our solar resources must be viewed as vital instruments to industrialise, modernise, and scale up access to essential services in line with the African Union Agenda 2063. We must deploy greater leverage around regional and continental financing platforms, maximising regional electricity markets and shared infrastructure. Our transition must be just, inclusive, and leave no one and no place behind.” said Mnangagwa.
The operationalisation of Africa50 DRE Fund, sponsored by ISA, was confirmed. Africa50 DRE Fund is a financing platform designed to mobilise concessional, institutional and private capital for distributed renewable energy projects across Africa. The facility will focus on building bankable project pipelines and supporting private-sector-led deployment for rural communities, farmers, MSMEs and other productive users of energy.
The opportunity comes with underwriting challenges. The major risk is the lack of reliable historical data in many emerging solar markets. Insurers need information about equipment performance, weather events, claims, project revenues and operational failures to price policies accurately.
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