The EAPP serves 13 member States and more than 620 million citizens, making it the operational anchor of the African Single Electricity Market. Between 2024 and 2026 member States commissioned over 8 GW of low-carbon generation capacity. The build-out is real — and it is landing in the wrong places.
Generation has grown; access has not equalised. Surpluses in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda sit alongside structural deficits in eastern DR Congo (−9.7%), Sudan (−16.7%) and South Sudan (−56.7%). Cross-border transmission and a transparent wholesale clearing mechanism are the prerequisites for regional industrial competitiveness — not follow-on projects.
Installed capacity tells you what a member State owns. Set against national peak demand, it tells you what the region can trade — and where the shortfall has to be bought at diesel prices.
Bars show installed capacity; the marker on each bar is national peak demand.
Capacity above or below peak demand, as a share of peak demand. Positive is exportable headroom; negative is a structural deficit.
Member States have not converged on a common technology stack. Kenya leads on geothermal and variable renewables; Ethiopia and Uganda run hydro cascades; Egypt balances combined-cycle gas against solar and wind; Tanzania pairs new hydro with domestic gas. Complementarity — not uniformity — is what makes a pool worth trading in.
Share of the pool's ~76.8 GW installed base, by technology.
Named assets against a 3,841 MW grid total. Olkaria supplies non-intermittent baseload at capacity factors above 92%; the Seven Forks hydro cascade carries dynamic spinning reserve for the National Control Centre in Nairobi.
Balance of the fleet — the Seven Forks hydro cascade (Gitaru, Kamburu, Kiambere) and thermal IPPs — is not itemised in the source brief and is shown as one residual band.
The single most consequential number in the brief. Ethiopian hydro clears at 2.5¢/kWh. A mine in Katanga, 1,500 km away and unconnected, pays up to 55¢/kWh for diesel. Every corridor in Section IV is an argument about closing this gap.
Bars show the stated point cost; the lighter extension shows the upper bound where the brief gives a range.
Physical integration rests on HVDC backbones for long-distance asynchronous transfer and HVAC lines for regional synchronisation. Four missing links isolate generation hubs from the power-deficient industrial regions that need them.
Utility solvency splits between cost-reflective regimes (Kenya, Rwanda) and heavily subsidised systems (Ethiopia, Sudan). Across the pool, transmission and distribution losses stay far above the 15% regional target — energy that is generated, paid for, and never billed.
Every utility in the sample sits above the 15% regional target.
Model the revenue recovered by cutting non-technical losses through Advanced Metering Infrastructure and split-prepaid smart meters. Move any control.
The EAPP is moving from static bilateral contracts to an automated Day-Ahead Market. Under merit-order dispatch the lowest-marginal-cost assets clear first, and the last asset called sets the System Marginal Price that every seller receives.
Move regional demand and watch the stack fill from the bottom up. The System Marginal Price is set by the most expensive asset required to meet the last megawatt.
To realise the African Single Electricity Market, the UNECA Secretariat directs member States and institutional investors toward a set of core capital-mobilisation pillars.
Establish availability-based concession frameworks backed by DFI political risk insurance, to accelerate completion of the Tanzania–Zambia (ZTK) interconnector and the Uganda–DRC line.
Target IRR 11%–14% USDDeploy 20–100 MW BESS installations at major transmission junction nodes — Suswa, Singida, Tororo — for primary frequency response, synthetic inertia and peak-hour arbitrage on the Day-Ahead Market.
20–100 MW per nodeStructure performance-based utility concessions to drive non-technical losses down across high-loss distribution grids — SNEL in DR Congo, EEU in Ethiopia.
Regional target: below 15% lossesMobilise climate finance for radial high-voltage interconnectors into Somalia and South Sudan, displacing expensive diesel mini-grids with low-cost regional hydro and geothermal imports.
Displaces $0.30–0.50/kWh dieselThe short answers, for readers arriving from search. Each one is expanded in the sections above.
The Eastern Africa Power Pool (EAPP) is the regional power-trading institution serving 13 member States and more than 620 million citizens. It is the operational anchor of the African Single Electricity Market, coordinating cross-border transmission, joint planning and eventual competitive trading between national utilities.
The pool carries roughly 76.8 GW of installed capacity against peak demand of about 58.4 GW — a utilisation of around 76%. Egypt alone accounts for 58,000 MW, which exceeds the rest of the pool combined and is why it is charted separately in Section II.
Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda hold substantial reserve margins above national peak demand. Eastern DR Congo (−9.7%), Sudan (−16.7%) and South Sudan (−56.7%) run structural deficits, met with expensive thermal and diesel generation. The commercial opportunity in the region is the distance between those two groups.
Hydropower dominates at about 61% of the regional mix, followed by gas at roughly 22%, geothermal at about 7% and other renewables at around 10%. That hydro concentration is the pool's principal climate-risk exposure: a dry year is a supply event across several member States at once.
Inter-utility transfer capacity has expanded from 654 MW to 4,720 MW — a 7.2× increase. It nonetheless remains the binding constraint. Generation has grown considerably faster than the corridors available to move it, which is the finding this brief is built around.
Delivered cost of energy spans roughly $0.025/kWh for large regional hydro to about $0.55/kWh for emergency diesel in deficit markets — a more than twenty-fold spread. That spread, not generation scarcity, is the core commercial case for interconnection.
It was written by Salome Temba for Interglobal EcoVista as Intelligence Brief 1 of 2026, translating the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa report on the Eastern Africa Power Pool into an investment-facing read. Figures 1 and 2 are reproduced from that brief; methodology and source notes are in the footer.
Sixteen A4 pages, formatted for circulation to a board, an investment committee or a ministerial desk. Every chart on this page, rendered for print, plus the full source notes and methodology.
