Africa is the world’s fastest-growing energy market. You’d barely know it from investment numbers
By Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi
There’s a line buried deep in the IEA’s new Global Energy Review 2026 that I had to read twice, because it ran so directly against the story I’m used to hearing about Africa’s place in the global energy conversation. Among all the major regions the report tracks, China, the United States, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, India, the European Union, Africa posted the fastest energy demand growth of any of them in 2025, at 2.9%. Not just fast. The fastest.
And while energy demand growth slowed almost everywhere else in the world compared with 2024, China decelerated, India slowed sharply, the European Union barely grew at all, the report notes that Africa was one of only two regions globally, alongside the Middle East, where growth actually accelerated.
I don’t think most people would have guessed that. I’m not sure I would have, before reading the data.
The report names Nigeria specifically once, and it’s worth sitting with. Oil consumption across Africa rose by 190,000 barrels a day in 2025, and the report attributes most of that increase directly to a rebound in Nigerian demand. In a year when oil demand growth slowed almost everywhere else in the world held back by electric vehicle adoption, weak petrochemical demand, and economic uncertainty, Nigeria’s consumption moved in the opposite direction.
There’s a reasonable case that this is a sign of economic life: rising oil demand often tracks rising industrial activity, transport use, and household consumption. But I’d push back gently on reading it as straightforwardly good news. A demand rebound built on oil, in a country where energy demand growth is already outpacing nearly the entire world, is a data point about direction, not about diversification.
The question worth asking isn’t whether Nigeria’s energy appetite is growing, the data already answered that. It’s what’s actually filling that appetite.
Here’s where it gets really uncomfortable, globally, renewable capacity additions hit a record 800 gigawatts in 2025. China alone added nearly 500 gigawatts of that over 60% of the entire world’s new renewable capacity in a single year. The European Union added a record 85 gigawatts.
India’s renewable additions grew nearly 60% year-on-year. Sub-Saharan Africa’s renewable capacity additions doubled in 2025 too which sounds encouraging, until you see the absolute number: around 12 gigawatts, for the entire region. South Africa, the standout performer, installed just over 3 gigawatts of solar in a single year for the first time. That’s a genuine milestone for South Africa. It’s also roughly one-hundredth of what China added in the same 12 months.
So here’s the picture the report leaves me with: a region growing its energy appetite faster than anywhere else on earth, met by a clean energy buildout that’s growing in percentage terms but remains a rounding error in global scale. Doubling a small number is still a small number.
Why this gap deserves more attention than it gets
I’ve sat through enough energy and development panels to know how this conversation usually goes. Someone points out that Africa’s growth is a positive signal, proof of economic momentum, rising incomes, a continent finally catching up. That’s not wrong but it’s an incomplete read if it stops there, because the report is also quietly showing us which way the marginal barrel and the marginal kilowatt are likely to come from if investment in clean alternatives doesn’t scale to match demand.
This isn’t a uniquely African problem, the same report shows the United States leaning back into coal in 2025, and gas-to-coal switching happening for purely price-driven reasons in one of the world’s wealthiest economies. Demand growth outpacing clean supply isn’t a developing-world failure. It’s a global coordination failure that happens to land hardest wherever growth is fastest and capital is scarcest, which this year, more than most, was Africa.
The continent isn’t short on energy ambition, the data makes that obvious. What it’s short on is investment moving at the same speed as that ambition and that gap, more than any single number in this report, is the one worth returning to.
- Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi, CEO of Do Take Action, is an independent consultant on edtech, climate change, public policy, and women’s procurement empowerment
