Story by: Mabel Adorkor Annang
To achieve universal access to electricity across West Africa, West African countries must strengthen regional collaboration to deliver stable and affordable electricity to all.
Speaking at the 2025 West Africa Energy Cooperation Summit in Accra, Minister of Energy and Green Transition, Dr. John Jinapor, stressed that this hinges on deeper integration and coordinated power sharing through the West African Power Pool (WAPP).
“If you look at our various economies, we have cycles of peak demand and cycles of off-peak demand. Sometimes when Ghana has peak demand in certain months, Nigeria would have low peak demand in those months because of festivities and occasions. Ghana then has to sell its excess capacity to Nigeria or to, say, Burkina or Mali, so that in times when we need more and they have less, we can also take that from them. But even more importantly, if we pool resources together, we can seek cheaper financing, which will help develop our infrastructure and transmission networks,” he said.
Nigeria’s Minister for Power, Mr. Adebayo Adelabu, outlined measures Nigeria is implementing to boost power generation and position itself as a key electricity exporter within West Africa.
He said, “we have successfully synchronised the transmission lines across the 15 countries in West Africa for over four hours and the transmission was stable with no fear of collapse. In the next couple of months, we’ll move to the second level of tests which will be for like three or four days. Once that is achieved, we can actually transit into permanent synchronisation of transmission lines in West Africa whereby we can effectively implement the comparative advantage of producing power from countries with such advantage like Nigeria and Ghana and transmit the same to the rest of the countries in West Africa. This will ensure that we achieve this cost that is applied to West African citizens.”
The 2025 West Africa Energy Cooperation Summit emphasized the need for deeper regional collaboration to enhance energy security, accelerate infrastructure development, and unlock investment opportunities critical to the sub-region’s sustainable energy transition.
Key discussions centered on strengthening electricity trading among member states, particularly as Ghana continues to export power to neighboring countries while relying on Nigeria for gas supply through the West African Power Pool (WAPP).
The summit further called for the swift finalization of interconnection protocols and the operationalization of regional energy corridors.
Some Energy Ministers from West Africa emphasized the need to harmonize transmission tariffs and market rules across member states to build a more efficient and integrated regional electricity market capable of supporting universal energy access across West Africa.
