The government of Sierra Leone plans to implement a results-based financing (RBF) mechanism to develop solar minigrids.
The RBF model will provide grants to private minigrid developers and operators based on the number of connections they set up.
The chosen developers will finance, build, own and operate the minigrids, with grants disbursed upon verification of defined milestones.
Sustainable Energy for All, an organization hosted by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), will implement the project in cooperation with UNOPS to electrify 35,000 households. The European Union will contribute €20 million ($20.6 million).
“The use of RBF for the rollout of solar minigrids is an important step for Sierra Leone,” said EU Ambassador to Sierra Leone Jacek Jankowski. “As the RBF mechanism is scalable, it has the potential to lead to a palpable acceleration in rural electrification.”
The Sierra Leone Ministry of Energy has identified 703 sites with minigrid potential across the country through its national online database for electrification. There are currently more than 100 solar minigrids in operation in Sierra Leone under private sector portfolios.
The European Union is working with the Sierra Leone government to develop access requirements to RBF grant funds, including procedures for the selection of developers and operators.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Sierra Leone had deployed 9 MW of solar at the end of 2023. Financing was secured for a 50 MW solar project in December 2023.
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It’s important to realise that the electricity data for African countries (and probably many other developing regions of the world) from major international think tanks like IRENA, BP statistical review of world energy, and the IEA, is worse than useless.
Ember’s China solar export tracker shows nearly 200MW of solar panels imported into Sierra Leone between 2017 and November 2024, with 90MW in 2024 alone (to November).
This discrepancy between reported solar capacity by major agencies, and the imports of solar panels, can be seen across every African country. It’s confirmed just by perusing media reports of individual projects and comparing those to IRENA or IEA capacity data. For example, if you look at Nigeria on the IRENA data explorer you’ll see net additions of a few MW in any given year, but if you actually read the news from Nigeria you’ll see regular reports of new projects totalling hundreds of MW in any given year.
These high numbers are supported by the Ember solar exports monthly tracker which show that Nigeria along with 7 other African nations (Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Namibia, South Africa, and Senegal) have already entered the solar gigawatt club, with Tanzania about to join. The discrepancy is further confirmed by reporting from national electricity utilities such as South Africa’s Eskom, which provides a monthly update on estimated solar capacity in the country based on some neat modelling. Gigawatts of solar power have been installed in South Africa in the last two years, versus MW reported by IRENA and the IEA.
Ember is better than the others with the data from some low and middle-income countries, but even they have huge discrepancies between their reported capacity and their solar export tracker for most African countries.
Ember currently reports about 13GW of solar capacity for Africa in 2023, versus 28 GW of cumulative Chinese Solar panel imports by the end of 2023. In 2024 alone (to November) over 11GW of Chinese solar panels were imported into Africa, probably bringing the total for the year to 12 or 13 GW. This is excluding imports from other regions and second-hand imports from Europe and Asia.
The bottom line is that these international data sets are based on reporting and estimates from host nations, primarily of formal grid data, and are almost completely ignoring or severely underestimating the organic growth of solar in poor countries.
The international agencies simply have not put the mechanisms in place to track the real growth of energy demand and renewable supply in Africa, with Ember being the best but still far off from the reality. The discrepancy between data and reality has real-world consequences for funding, international negotations, and even domestic policy when poor countries are being advised by international experts from respected agencies.
That was a long-winded way to say that Sierra Leone has likely deployed at least 20 times more solar than reported by IRENA.