US agency offers Sierra Loan $430 mln grant to boost electricity access

The Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. state development fund, offered a grant of $430 million to help Sierra Leone generalize electricity access.

The grant would back efforts to give electricity access to some 4.6 million people in the country where 30% of the population lacks electricity.

Electricity access is a major issue in Sub-Saharan Africa, where some countries such as South Sudan has an electricity access rate of only 7%.

Even large resource-rich countries such as DRC and the CAR have poor electricity access rates at 19% and 15% respectively.

The continent’s first industrialized nation, South Africa, has an electricity access rate of 86% but power outages have been more recurrent in recent months with an impact on the economy expected at 2 percentage points of GDP annually.

Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria have an electricity access rate of 100%.