It’s March 2025, with the first quarter around the corner as the world focuses on the urgency of energy transition following US President Donald Trump’s troubling but expected approach to energy and climate change.

It has been a year of change. However, what hasn’t changed is this urgency and size of the task when it comes to addressing disparities in energy access, with 3.8 million people still considered energy-poor.

Advancing energy access for the world’s most vulnerable people has become a national, regional and global priority.

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) recently launched a new strategy in India ahead of the pioneering Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, says The Rockefeller Foundation’s senior vice-president, power, Ashvin Dayal.

The Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit led by the World bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB) in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, the GEAPP, the United Nations Sustainable Energy for ALL and other partners, was a pivotal moment in Africa’s development future.

At the Dar summit, African leaders led by the World Bank and the Mission 300’s goal committed to drastically cut the continent’s energy poverty by halving the 600 million people without access to electricity while also addressing associated climate risks. The goal is to get half of Africa’s 600 million unelectrified people access to power in just six years, averaging five million people a month, more than double the current rate. The ambition is big, and the business-as-usual approach won’t get us there, argues Dayal

African heads of state and government made the commitment, as partners pledged more than US$50 billion in support of increasing energy across Africa. By addressing the fundamental challenge of energy access, Mission 300 serves as the cornerstone of the jobs agenda for Africa’s growing youth population, the foundation of future development, while building resilience to the impacts of climate change.

Additional funding

The African leaders attending the summit committed to concrete reforms and actions to expand access to reliable, affordable and sustainable electricity to power growth, improve quality of life, and drive job creation.

The African-led summit acquired an additional US$8 billion for energy transformation after the World Bank and the AfDB announced a plan to allocate US$48 billion in financing for Mission 300 through 2030. Agence Française de Développement (AFD) committed 1 billion euros, the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank US$1 billion to US$1.5 billion, the Islamic Development Bank US$2.65 billion, and the OPEC Fund US$1 billion.

The Rockefeller Foundation committed US$15.9 million to support the work, including US$10 million to Zafiri, the World Bank’s new distributed renewable energy investment company.

The Rockefeller Foundation is focused on advancing human opportunity and reversing the climate crisis by transforming systems in food, health, energy and finance, with a particular focus on improving access to electricity, especially in Africa, and supporting African-led energy transition solutions.

“Renewable energy technologies are more accessible and affordable than ever, partnerships are scaling in ways that are new and innovative, electrification targets are more ambitious and energy access is becoming the number one development priority across many low- and middle-income countries,” notes Dayal.

He says that despite the uncertainty in navigating a constantly changing environment, the global community must maintain a spirit of collaboration and continue its efforts with an even greater sense of urgency and determination.

“Prioritising energy access is the most powerful way to advance human opportunity,” he asserts.

Rockefeller Foundation President Raj Shah says Mission 300 was successful for three reasons. First because its success hinges on being African-led at every stage.

“The fact that over two dozen Heads of State signed the Dar es Salaam Declaration, committing to concrete actions to expand reliable electricity access is an extraordinary achievement,” states Shah.

Second, he adds, two extremely important global financing institutions have said their number one priority for Africa is electrification, to prove this they announced during the Africa Energy Summit that they plan to allocate US$48 billion in financing for Mission 300 through to 2030.

Third, a major goal of the summit was to create the policy, regulatory and financing frameworks that give the private sector greater confidence to invest in the electricity sector. The summit brought together a wide range of CEOs, investors, partners, grid developers and entrepreneurs.

Most importantly, 12 countries presented detailed National Energy Compacts (NECs) with country-specific targets and time-bound commitments that provide regulatory and policy clarity.

Dayal believes that Mission 300 is a one-in-a-generation opportunity, addressing not just a moral imperative, but one of the most important levers to unlocking Africa’s vast potential – electricity. By unleashing the full potential of renewables, fostering innovative partnerships with clear and ambitious joint targets, and driving investment in a coordinated manner, Mission 300 has the potential to reshape Africa’s future.

“We are proud to be part of this ambition and we are firmly focused on making connections happen while supporting governments in making their national energy compacts a reality,” states Dayal in The Rockefeller Foundations Power Play newsletter.

With senior leaders from the GEAPP, The Rockefeller Foundation team met partners and stakeholders supporting India’s ambition to deliver abundant, clean energy to its people and growing economy.

Stirring strides

In 2028, India’s government achieved its ambitious goal of electrifying all the country’s villages, and three years later set an ambitious target of deploying 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, of which 200GW has already been achieved.

While these numbers deserve applause, two-thirds of India’s population still live in rural areas, and two-thirds of them are considered energy-poor. This means hundreds of millions of people are still unable to fully participate in the economic transformation the rest of India and the world is experiencing.

Dayal also notes how the rise of public-private-philanthropic partnerships (PPPPs) has led to a new approach of collective action where, instead of competing, talent, skills, capital and technology can be pooled together for greater scale and outcomes.

The catalytic role philanthropic resources can play in bringing together the private and public sectors for projects that would otherwise be perceived as high-risk and avoided was recently explored by Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in TIME magazine.

Prof Schwab argues that by providing initial funding and proof of concept, philanthropies can help create an enabling environment that encourages larger-scale investments.

Finance institutions and multilateral development banks can then amplify these efforts by signing their resources with philanthropic dollars and private investors. In many ways, Prof Schwab explains exactly how The Rockefeller is working together with the GEAPP, the World Bank and the AfDB on Mission 300.

It is on this basis that the WEF launched the Giving to Amplify Earth Action (GAEA) Davos Awards, which aim to spotlight successful PPPPs advancing systems transformation. Out of more than 120 nominees and 25 finalists, GEAPP took home the Catalytic-Philanthropic-Public-Private-Partnership at the WEF annual meeting in Davos in January.