Powering West Africa Together: Lessons from the first cross-border grid connected solar procurement

West Africa's power sectors remain heavily dependent on liquid fuels, exposing governments to oil price volatility and leaving utilities in financial distress. For many countries in the region, markets are simply too small to attract the large-scale private investment needed to drive an energy transition.

As Part of the ESMAP-Africa learning series: Electrifying Africa — Delivering on Mission 300 Faster Together, this session explores how Liberia and Sierra Leone found a practical solution — pooling demand across borders to jointly conduct the first-ever cross-border competitive procurement for solar PV and battery storage. Financed under the World Bank Group's RESPITE project and aligned with their Mission 300 National Energy Compacts, the initiative brought online Liberia's first grid-connected solar plant and expanded Sierra Leone's generation capacity by 25 percent, at tariffs 80 percent below oil-based generation.

Participants will leave with concrete insights into the legal, institutional, and commercial arrangements that made this collaboration possible, and what it could mean for scaling similar approaches across the region.