Africa holds 60 per cent of the world’s best solar resources, yet the continent currently accounts for only a tiny fraction of global installed capacity and clean energy investment.

Michael David, the executive director of the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation, said this in a message on the commemoration of Africa Day 2026 in Abuja on Monday.

”Africa is rich in solar energy but starved of investment. The continent holds 60 per cent of the world’s solar potential, yet attracts less than three per cent of global energy investment. Africa also has wind corridors in its north and south capable of powering industrial-scale generation.

”Here is the paradox that should fill every African leader with both outrage and ambition. The continent least responsible for the climate crisis holds the resources most needed to solve it. It has geothermal energy bubbling beneath the East African Rift that could light cities from Nairobi to Addis Ababa for centuries.

”It has rivers whose hydroelectric potential is barely tapped. And beneath its soils lie the lithium, cobalt, manganese, and graphite that the world needs to build the batteries that will store the renewable energy of the future,” Mr David said.

He said African leaders must invest in clean energy and youth empowerment to unlock the continent’s vast human and natural potential.

He urged African leaders to prioritise unity and pan-African cooperation in addressing the continent’s pressing challenges, especially climate change, energy poverty and food insecurity.

According to him, the African Development Bank estimates that the continent needs over $50 billion a year in adaptation finance but receives a fraction of that.

”The gap is not a technical problem. It is a political one, and it will only be closed by governments willing to make it the central demand of their foreign policy.

”Africa’s young people, and more than 60 per cent of the continent’s population under 30, are not waiting for permission to build this future. They are already building solar microgrids in peri-urban communities and developing drought-resistant crop varieties in university laboratories.

”Coding climate risk platforms that give smallholder farmers access to weather data that was once the preserve of large agribusinesses,” he said. 

(NAN)