Key Findings
The third edition of the Africa-EU Energy Partnership’s European Financial Flows on SDG7 to Africa report shows that the African continent remains far from achieving the main SDG7 targets, and is progressing too slowly to meet the 2030 objective.
Whilst the target for renewable energy’s share in the mix is advancing well in the electricity sector, progress in other areas is insufficient. Electricity access is improving too slowly, and clean cooking and energy efficiency are regressing. For electricity and clean cooking access, population growth outpaces the development of new infrastructure.
The current level of financial commitments is inadequate and must be significantly increased to accelerate progress towards the key benchmarks.

This report highlights a number of trends over the study period (2014-2022), including the following:
- Public donors have increased levels of financing over the period, although not by enough.
- Substantial financing has been provided by public donors towards RE projects and T&D projects. Financing to policy support and capacity-building has strongly increased but clean cooking and energy efficiency have been dramatically underfunded.
- Mobilised private sector investments to SDG7 projects were rising year-on-year from 2014 to 2019.
- Meanwhile, African national governmental commitments have severely declined since 2021
The report also highlights the key role of EU Institutions and Member States (EI & MS) in supporting the achievement of SDG7 in Africa:
EI & MS are the second largest provider of SDG7-compliant finance after multilaterals.
- EI & MS provide important funding to SDG7 through multilaterals, either with energy-related core contributions, or directly for SDG7 projects.
- EI & MS are the first provider of ODA grants, and ODA loans show a high level of concessionality.
- EI & MS are a key provider of instruments to leverage the private sector investments, mostly towards the renewable energy sector.
