Africa Is Preparing for an Energy Transition. We Are Not Preparing the People Who Must Lead It.

I have spent years listening to conversations about Africa's energy transition, and most of them sound remarkably similar.

We talk about solar panels, transmission lines, critical minerals, climate finance, green hydrogen, smart grids, carbon markets, artificial intelligence, battery storage, electric vehicles, etc. Every conference produces another list of technologies that promise to transform the continent, most reports identify another financing gap that must be closed, and almost every summit yields another pledge that must be fulfilled.

But increasingly, I leave those rooms thinking about something else entirely. Who is actually going to govern all of this?

Who is going to write the regulations, negotiate the contracts, design the procurement frameworks, manage the trade-offs between decarbonisation and affordability, hold utilities accountable, sit across the table from international investors who have done this before and understand exactly what they are doing?

That question rarely receives the attention it deserves. Yet it may be the most consequential question Africa's energy transition has to answer.

The transition has become a governance challenge

Consider what Africa is actually being asked to implement.

Mission 300, the joint initiative between the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank, aims to connect 300 million people to electricity by 2030. Since its launch, it has supported 30 countries in developing National Energy Compacts: documents that define electrification targets, the reforms required to meet them, and the investment structures that will finance them. Each compact assumes that the ministries, regulators, and utilities responsible for delivering it have the institutional capacity to do so.

The AfDB's Desert to Power initiative, which in June 2026 witnessed the signing of three contracts for 1,373 km of power transmission networks between Mauritania and Mali, is a similar case. The infrastructure is being procured, but who will operate the cross-border electricity market it is designed to enable? Who will regulate it and arbitrate disputes when generation and demand curves diverge between two national systems with different pricing frameworks and political pressures?

The Africa Critical Minerals Framework, the digital utility programmes spreading across Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda, and the satellite monitoring systems being deployed to track emissions, all of these initiatives assume capable institutions at the receiving end. They assume people who understand both the technical requirements and the governance architecture required to turn a project into a functioning system.

In too many cases, those people don't yet exist in sufficient numbers, and we are not building them fast enough.

Technology is now moving faster than the government

Earlier this year, the European Environment Agency published two significant briefings. The first, Navigating Europe's Twin Transition, examined what happens when digitalisation and sustainability arrive in the same policy moment. The second examined AI's role in sustainable consumption. Taken together, they make a finding that I think applies with even greater force to Africa than to Europe.

The European Commission's concept of the Twin Transition is built on a recognition that the green and digital transitions can't be managed separately. Decarbonising an electricity system and digitising it aren't two sequential tasks, but simultaneous pressures on the same physical infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, institutional budgets, and the same pool of human expertise. The EEA found that if deployed without systemic oversight, AI can obscure trade-offs, create new dependencies, and reinforce unsustainable patterns, not because the technology is malign, but because the governance is inadequate.

Data centres require energy, water, and critical raw materials. AI inference, the operational phase of AI, now accounting for roughly 80 to 90 percent of total AI-related computing according to MIT research cited in the EEA briefing, places continuous and growing demands on electricity systems. The rapid expansion of data centres is itself driving rising demand for energy and critical minerals, in ways that efficiency gains alone are unlikely to offset. These are governance questions. Not engineering questions.

Africa has the same challenge, under difficult conditions

Africa isn't waiting for the digital transition because it is happening now and intersecting with the energy transition at every level.

Nigeria is deploying smart metering systems and advanced grid monitoring infrastructure. Utilities across the continent have entered what Enlit Africa described in May 2026 as a new era of digital grid management, with AI, smart metering, and real-time operational visibility emerging as critical tools. Kenya Power is on a digitisation journey, Rwanda's AI-powered mini-grids are supplying villages with reliable solar power, and Ethiopia's Digital Ethiopia 2030 blueprint, launched in late 2025, ties energy modernisation directly to economic digitalisation.

IBM and Elsewedy Electric announced in April 2026 a strategic collaboration to apply AI-led decision support across energy operations in Egypt. South Africa has a National AI Policy Framework, and Kenya has a National AI Strategy. These are the early architecture of energy systems that will, within a decade, require regulators who understand AI, policymakers who understand grid markets, procurement officers who understand data governance, and lawyers who understand the intersection of cybersecurity and critical infrastructure.

So, I am asking this question, because I think it gets avoided in the policy conversation: Who is writing those regulations? Who in an African ministry today understands both AI and electricity markets well enough to design a governance framework for AI-managed grid dispatch? Who understands both digital governance and climate finance well enough to structure a blended finance instrument for a smart mini-grid project? Who understands both cybersecurity and national grid architecture well enough to protect a digitised utility from the class of attacks that increasingly target energy infrastructure globally?

These aren't hypothetical requirements, but the practical demands of the energy transition Africa is currently implementing. And the pipeline of people trained to meet them is nowhere near adequate to the task.

The skills conversation itself is wrong

I have written before about Africa's workforce deficit in grid operations, the shortage of protection engineers, system operators, and transmission specialists that sits behind the collapse pattern of power systems across the continent. That argument attracted significant attention, and I stand by it completely.

But there is a category of gap that sits above the technical workforce and receives even less attention. I mean the policy and governance workforce: the energy economists who can model the fiscal implications of a utility reform, the behavioural scientists who understand why communities do or do not adopt clean cooking, grid planners who can design a transmission expansion that accounts for both renewable variability and industrial demand growth, climate negotiators who know what Africa can credibly commit to at COP and what it cannot, digital regulators who understand both the opportunity and the environmental footprint of AI in energy management, procurement specialists who can structure a power purchase agreement that does not expose a government to decades of contingent liability, and the environmental lawyers who can enforce the standards that make a critical minerals supply chain credible to European importers facing CBAM compliance.

Every one of those people is a governance actor, not a technical worker. They decide how panels get procured, regulated, maintained, monitored, and integrated into a system that serves people rather than extracting value from them.

Africa's energy transition won't fail because we cannot build solar farms. It will falter, in fact, it is already faltering in places, because we don't have enough people who understand how the entire system works, what it takes to hold it together institutionally, and what the trade-offs are when the technology changes faster than the governance can adapt.

What will actually determine the outcome

I have come to believe that the next phase of Africa's energy transition will not be determined by the next solar panel, battery chemistry, or the next climate finance pledge.

It will be determined by whether Africa builds institutions and the people to fill them, capable of making wise decisions long after today's technologies become obsolete.

Solar panels will change, artificial intelligence will change, battery chemistry will change, carbon market rules will change, the geopolitics of critical minerals will change, and so will the financing instruments.

But the quality of public decision-making and the strength of a regulatory framework endures. The capacity of an institution to absorb new information, adapt to new pressures, and protect the long-term public interest in the face of short-term commercial pressures is not a technology. It is a human capability that has to be built deliberately, sustained over time, and renewed across generations.

We have spent years asking how Africa can finance the energy transition. Enormous effort has gone into closing the investment gap, de-risking capital, designing blended finance structures, and improving project bankability.

These things matter. But perhaps it is time to ask, with equal urgency, a question that has not yet received equal investment.

Who is preparing the people who must lead it?