According to the World Bank’s April 2026 Africa Economic Update, Sub-Saharan Africa’s labour force is expected to grow by more than 620 million between 2025 and 2050. As I argued previously, whether that population growth becomes a demographic dividend will depend heavily on the continent’s ability to create productive employment. Generating enough productive jobs for this many people will require major changes in African economies. As agriculture becomes more productive, it will need fewer workers to produce more. Technology will create important businesses and skilled jobs, but not enough to absorb Africa’s growing labour force. Manufacturing has historically helped countries move large numbers of people into more productive work, and Africa will likely need a much larger industrial sector to meet its employment challenge.
China offers an example of how that can be achieved. Its manufacturing rise began with labour-intensive industries that absorbed millions of workers in garments, footwear, toys and electronics assembly. By the early 2010s, China had an estimated 85–100 million manufacturing workers, most of them in labour-intensive industries. The highly automated Chinese factories that the rest of the world compete with today came after decades of industrial development.
That expansion also pushed up electricity demand with China’s installed generating capacity rising from about 217 GW in 1995 to around 339 GW by 2001 and continued expanding rapidly as industrial demand grew according to the World Bank. Electricity supply expanded rapidly alongside the country’s manufacturing base.
About 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, or 47 per cent of the population, still lacked access to electricity in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. North African countries and South Africa, with less than 20 per cent of Africa’s population, account for more than 65 per cent of the continent’s installed electricity capacity. That leaves a large part of Sub-Saharan Africa trying to expand its economy with relatively little power.
A manufacturer looking at a country will want to know whether there is enough power to run a plant and whether supply can keep up if the business expands. If the answer is no, the company either must spend more providing its own electricity or choose another location.
Bangladesh built a large labour-intensive manufacturing sector with much lower electricity use than China or South Korea. Its garment industry employs about four million people and accounts for roughly 82 per cent of exports, and the country has since moved into footwear, leather goods, light engineering, plastics and electrical products. Even there, manufacturers have also had to cope with unreliable grid supply.
If African countries are to use labour-intensive manufacturing as part of the answer to the jobs challenge, they will be entering a tougher competitive environment than China did. Chinese factories already have decades of experience, large supplier networks and much higher levels of automation. African countries do, however, have an advantage in some industries because many of the raw materials are produced on the continent. That can make local processing and manufacturing more competitive in value chains built around those resources.
The Democratic Republic of Congo alone produces around 75 per cent of the world’s cobalt, while Africa also has major reserves of manganese – 75% of global supplies, copper, bauxite, graphite and phosphate. If more of these resources were processed before export, African countries could capture more of the industrial activity that currently takes place elsewhere.
This is where electricity becomes important again. Processing bauxite into aluminium, refining minerals, producing steel or making fertiliser all require large and reliable power supplies. The advantage of having the raw material nearby is reduced if the electricity needed to process it is too expensive or unreliable. The IEA’s 2025 work on African industrial value chains identifies limited energy supply as one of the constraints on developing more of this industry on the continent.
Ghana and South Africa have already experienced the economic cost when electricity supply falls short. Research on Ghana’s 2012–16 power crisis estimated that it increased unemployment by about 4.7 percentage points and reduced the number of non-energy FDI investments by 12.3 per cent. South Africa’s load shedding disrupted businesses across the economy and reduced growth. In both cases, the problem was not whether electricity could support some future industrial ambition. Businesses that already existed were struggling to get the power they needed.
Moving away from manufacturing will not make the electricity problem disappear. Agro-processing, tourism, logistics, banking and technology use very different amounts of power, but all become more difficult or expensive when supply is unreliable. A hotel running generators or a cold-storage business paying for backup power may remain open, but it is still carrying a cost that a competitor elsewhere may not have.
There is then the question of what happens if African economies succeed in expanding these activities. Electricity demand will rise with them. China was able to add generation and transmission quickly as its manufacturing sector grew. Many African utility companies are financially weak, financing is expensive and new power projects can take years to reach the grid. Countries struggling to meet demand today will have to add capacity much faster if industrial and other productive activity begins growing at scale.
There is already a major effort to expand supply and access. The World Bank and African Development Bank’s Mission 300 initiative aims to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030. The IEA estimates that universal electricity access in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2035 would require around $150 billion of investment. Those numbers give some indication of the scale of the electricity challenge before the additional demand from a faster growing and more industrial economy is considered.
Africa cannot expand productive employment at the scale it needs while its power systems remain weak. If industry and other productive sectors expand, power demand will rise with them. The problem is that many African electricity systems are already struggling before that growth has even happened.