Lighting the Last Mile: Mozambique’s Solar Turn — and the Two Projects Built to Power It

In Chicumbane, a farming community along the Limpopo River in Mozambique’s Gaza Province, evening still means the end of the working day for many families. When the light goes, so does the sewing machine, the welding shop, the refrigerator at the corner store, the lamp a student reads by. It is a scene repeated across the country: Mozambique has made remarkable progress on electrification — access has roughly doubled since 2018, reaching about two-thirds of the population — yet millions of people remain beyond the grid’s edge, and the progress is uneven. In Maputo, the capital, connection rates approach 97 percent. In parts of the countryside, they remain below 40 percent.

The gap is not just an inconvenience. Where power is absent or unreliable, clinics store vaccines without refrigeration, schools close at dusk, water cannot be pumped, and small businesses — the engine of rural employment — run on costly diesel or not at all. Households burn charcoal and kerosene, with all the health and environmental costs that follow. Even where the grid does reach, a system strained by fast-growing demand and extreme weather has forced the national utility, Electricidade de Moçambique (EDM), into load shedding and expensive emergency power. For a young, rapidly urbanizing nation of more than 30 million, electricity is the difference between potential and prosperity.

A problem bigger than one country

Mozambique’s story is Africa’s story. Roughly 600 million people across Sub-Saharan Africa — nearly half the continent — still live without electricity, the largest concentration of energy poverty on Earth. The consequences echo far beyond the household: economists consistently rank unreliable power among the top constraints on African growth, and every study of development — from infant health to girls’ education to small-business formation — finds the same quiet multiplier at work. Where the lights come on, nearly everything else improves.

Here is the paradox: none of this is for lack of sunshine, technology, or money. Solar power is now among the cheapest electricity ever built, Africa holds the world’s richest solar resource, and global institutional capital manages trillions in search of long-dated, inflation-protected income — precisely what a power plant produces. What has kept that capital on the sidelines is not the asset but the wrapper: utilities with strained balance sheets, revenues in fragile local currencies, and contracts investors could not price. The energy gap, in other words, is not an engineering problem. It is a structuring problem.

Which means it can be solved — and a template has emerged. Development finance institutions now stand behind utility payment obligations. Tariffs are written in hard currency. Governments compete to make projects bankable, because they have learned that a well-structured contract attracts in months what aid budgets cannot deliver in decades. The countries that master this playbook are electrifying at historic speed. Few have embraced it more decisively than Mozambique.

A national plan with a deadline

Mozambique’s government has answered with one of the most ambitious electrification drives in Africa. The national Energia para Todos (“Energy for All”) program, launched in 2018, commits the country to universal electricity access by 2030. The results so far have outpaced projections: access has climbed from 31 percent in 2018 to roughly 66 percent in 2025, with more than half a million new connections delivered under the World Bank–supported ProEnergia program. In 2025 the World Bank approved a further $100 million for Mozambique under its ASCENT initiative, part of the continent-wide “Mission 300” effort to connect 300 million Africans by 2030.

Connections alone are not enough — the country must also generate the power those new households and industries will use. The government’s energy compact targets a near-tripling of installed capacity, to roughly 6,000 MW by 2030, with renewables carrying a growing share: on-grid renewable capacity from independent power producers is targeted to more than quintuple by the end of the decade. Solar is central to that plan. Mozambique enjoys some of the strongest solar resources in southern Africa, and photovoltaic plants can be permitted, built, and connected in a fraction of the time a dam or gas plant requires.

The state cannot build it alone — and by design, it isn’t trying to. Mozambique’s strategy explicitly reserves a leading role for private developers and private capital.

Two projects, one proven pathway

That is where Gaza and Manica come in. Under a 200 MW national program memorandum signed with EDM in 2018, developer TroGreen Energy Moçambique has spent years moving two utility-scale solar projects through every gate of Mozambique’s permitting and utility process — the unglamorous groundwork that separates bankable infrastructure from paper ambitions.

Gaza (Chicumbane), 20 MW solar + battery storage. The lead asset sits outside Xai-Xai in Gaza Province. Its development file is complete and deep: land-use rights (DUAT) secured, feasibility and grid-integration studies done, environmental impact assessment approved and licensed, a grid connection agreement signed with EDM and the national network operator, and a connection and operation agreement covering both the solar plant and its battery energy storage system. The project is fully financially modelled, targets financial close in 2026, and is scheduled to deliver first power in 2027 — roughly 158,000 MWh of clean generation a year at full output.

Manica (Chibata), 60 MW solar. Three times Gaza’s size, the Manica project near the Zimbabwean border carries its own ministerial authorization (Despacho 30/2019) and mirrors the Gaza development file: land rights, feasibility, grid studies, environmental license, and a signed grid connection agreement with EDM and the network operator. It follows the pathway Gaza has already cleared — a deliberate strategy of proving the model once, then replicating it at scale.

Together the two plants will add 80 MW to a grid that needs every megawatt — enough clean energy each year to serve hundreds of thousands of Mozambican households — while creating construction and permanent operations jobs in two provinces where formal employment is scarce, and channeling community contributions and land-use payments into the districts that host them.

How the investment is protected

Feel-good stories do not finance power plants; structure does. The private capital these projects require is invested behind a security architecture negotiated over years with EDM and modelled on international project-finance practice:

• A 25-year, USD-denominated PPA. EDM purchases the plants’ output for 25 years at a fixed dollar tariff with annual inflation-linked escalation. Revenue is contracted before construction begins — there is no merchant or market-price exposure. If the buyer or the grid cannot take the power, “deemed output” provisions require payment as if the energy had been delivered.
• A bank guarantee behind the utility — backed by the French state. EDM’s payment obligations are backstopped by an irrevocable standby letter of credit issued by a tier-one international bank (minimum A−/A3 rating, selected in a competitive process run with the guarantor’s assistance) and guaranteed under the PPA by Agence Française de Développement (AFD), France’s public development finance institution, covering approximately 17 years from financial close. If an invoice goes unpaid, the seller draws on the letter of credit — investor cash flow does not depend on the utility’s balance sheet alone.
• EDM as co-owner, not just customer. The national utility holds a 5 percent equity stake in each asset-owning project company, aligning the off-taker’s interests with investors’ for the life of the asset.
• Real assets and institutional oversight. Investors sit senior-secured against physical plants with 25-year contracted lives, insured to international minimum-cover schedules, with an independent engineer, monthly operating reports, and a 97 percent guaranteed availability standard written into the PPA.

Layer by layer, the structure is designed to do one thing: separate the investment’s performance from the very risks — utility credit, currency, market price — that have historically kept private capital out of African power, so that capital can finally flow to where the sun is.

Green by design — and by consequence

These are green assets in the fullest sense. Every megawatt-hour the plants deliver is a megawatt-hour Mozambique does not have to source from diesel emergency generation or fossil imports — roughly 378 GWh of clean generation per year across the portfolio at full build-out, displacing carbon at national scale for a quarter century. The bond financing is structured in alignment with the ICMA Green Bond Principles: proceeds ring-fenced for renewable generation and grid connection, released against construction milestones, with use-of-proceeds and generation reporting to bondholders throughout.

For the country, the benefits compound: cleaner air, a more resilient and diversified grid, hard-currency-anchored infrastructure, local jobs, and visible progress toward a national promise — power for everyone, by 2030. For investors, it is the increasingly rare combination institutional capital looks for: a contracted, hard-currency cash flow; a layered security package; and a measurable, reportable contribution to the energy transition in one of the places on Earth where a solar panel changes the most lives.

In Chicumbane, the fields where the Gaza plant will rise are surveyed and licensed. The agreements are signed. The grid connection is engineered. What the sunlight over the Limpopo valley is waiting for now is capital — and the evening it finally keeps a light on.