Please join us for a virtual meeting of African unions and their allies on:
Date: October 22nd, 2025
Time: 13:00 Lome, Togo/14:00 Tunisia/15:00 Johannesburg, South Africa. Find your local time here.
Registration: REGISTER HERE! Anyone that wants to attend must please register. All registrants will receive a zoom link.
Interpretation: English and French
In early August 2025, the Africa Region of the ITUC convened an 80-person convening in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that committed to lead broad-based effort to Reclaim & Restore public energy systems.
Consistent with this commitment, national centres, affiliated unions, representatives of Global Union Federations and other allies are invited to join us for a discussion on the recently released “Mission 300” electrification proposal from the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Bank.
Informed by existing anti-privatisation struggles and campaigns being waged by unions in several countries on the continent, the meeting will consider ways to develop a unified response to Mission 300 and its push for further privatisation.
Launched in April 2024 by the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) Mission 300 is being presented as a private-sector led effort “to provide at least 300 million people in Africa with electricity by 2030.” In late January 2025, the effort received the endorsement of 48 African governments at a Heads of State Energy Summit on Providing Access to Electricity for 300 Million People in Africa by 2030, and in February 2025 Mission 300 was adopted by the African Union at its 38th Summit in Addis Ababa.
The African Union reiterated that governments “recognize that the private sector needs to play a central and determinant role…therefore creating an enabling environment for private sector investment is critical.” This “enabling environment” will consist of regulations supportive of private capital, accompanied by “appropriate incentives and innovative financing mechanisms.” The African Union also committed to push reforms to make power utilities “financially viable” by way of “tariff adjustments and efficiency improvement measures to ensure utilities achieve at least 100 percent operational cost recovery.” These formulations make visible the pro-private, anti-public biases of the AfDB and the willingness of the African Union to comply with a privatisation agenda.
The policy proposals in Mission 300 that have been adopted by the African Union are almost identical to the AfDB’s New Deal on Energy for Africa initiative. Launched in 2016, the New Deal pledged to mobilise private investment to achieve 100% access in urban areas and 95% access in rural areas by 2025. The project was a spectacular failure, and Mission 300 likely faces a similar fate because it also relies on “crowding in” private investment while increasing the pressure on public energy systems to achieve full cost recovery. The private sector failed to respond then, and there is little sign that it will do so in future–absent rock-solid investment guarantees that, if introduced, would further undermine public energy utilities.
Mission 300 presents unions with an opportunity to showcase the Reclaim & Restore alternative to addressing energy poverty supported by ITUC Africa and 12 of the region’s national trade union centres.
Currently, Reclaim & Restore:
During the October 22nd meeting we will consider ways to respond both to the privatisation agenda embedded in Mission 300, and to the governments that have endorsed it.
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