When Gridworks signed two landmark agreements with Uganda's government to build the Amari Project, something quietly shifted across Africa's energy landscape. The project is being widely hailed as Africa's first independent transmission infrastructure to reach construction phase — a milestone that signals a fundamental rethinking of how the continent's electricity reaches homes and businesses.
For much of Africa's history, electricity has flowed through a rigid hierarchy: giant utilities owned by governments, built around massive power plants, funneling energy through sprawling networks controlled from above. These systems made sense when building them required the kind of capital only states could muster. But the infrastructure aged, the finances crumbled, and many African utilities became trapped between growing demand and shrinking budgets. By the 1990s, countries began experimenting with something radical: splitting generation, transmission, and distribution into separate pieces and letting private companies bid for parts of the work.
The real acceleration came in the last decade, driven by the Paris Agreement's push for climate action and the sudden affordability of renewable energy. Countries began systematically opening their power sectors. Uganda unbundled its utilities. South Africa announced an Independent Transmission Programme requiring roughly 14,000 kilometres of new transmission lines at a cost of around R440 billion — capital the state acknowledged it simply cannot provide alone. Zambia, forced to diversify away from hydropower after devastating droughts exposed the fragility of depending on a single source, passed the Electricity (Open Access) Regulations of 2024, allowing independent power producers to sell directly to large users and neighbouring countries.
The numbers tell the story of shifting appetite. According to the Center on Global Energy Policy, nearly 87 percent of African countries now have regulatory frameworks governing public-private partnerships in energy. South Africa's renewable energy programme, running since 2011, has attracted roughly R272 billion in investment and delivered 95 projects generating more than 7,300 megawatts. The reforms are working because they're concrete: Zambia's new liquidity mechanisms and standardized contracts reduce barriers to entry and cut the time projects need to reach implementation.
What the Amari Project signals is where investor attention is heading next. Beyond solar and wind farms, the real bottleneck has always been the wires themselves — the transmission infrastructure that gets power from where it's generated to where people actually live. Africa needs grid modernization at scale, and for the first time, private money is willing to finance it. Gridworks' agreements in Uganda demonstrate that investors see bankable opportunities in transmission, not just generation. That confidence matters because transmission is unglamorous, essential infrastructure that requires patience and long-term certainty — the kind of bet investors only make when they believe the reforms are durable.
The momentum shows no sign of slowing. Zambia's framework is designed to reduce barriers and attract projects. South Africa continues its multi-year structural transformation. Across the continent, energy ministers are discovering that they don't need to do everything alone. The question no longer seems to be whether private capital will flow into Africa's electricity systems. It's where that capital will land first.