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Cape Town - The World Bank is planning to coordinate funding for 30 gigawatts of new power generation in Africa over the next five years, a senior official said on Monday.
"We are not going to finance everything ourselves, but how we can help leverage financing for that 30 gigawatts of additional capacity," Reynold Duncan, the bank's Africa energy specialist, told reporters on the sidelines of power conference.
All potential projects, including the mammoth Inga hydropower scheme on the Congo river in Democratic Republic of Congo, would be considered, Duncan added, but gave no details of specific project funding.
In a major report last year, the World Bank said sub-Saharan Africa needed to double its infrastructure spending to $93bn a year, 15% of regional output, to drag its road, water and power networks into the 21st century.
The region needs an extra 7 000 megawatts of capacity a year to meet the demand of its 800 million people, who currently have access to the same amount of power as Spain, with a population of just 45 million.
