There is a very inspiring and hopeful piece looking at Africa put together a couple of weeks ago by blogger Skander Garroum in his pages on Climate Drift – where he shows Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa

The blogger Noah Smith has just put together a summary of this excellent piece, together with his own observations, in his own blog piece At least five interesting things: Future of Humanity edition (#72):

Solarpunk is the future of Africa

I’m constantly amused by the fact that the 1980s/90s cyberpunk visions largely came true, and I enjoy speculating about what future visions might come true next. One candidate is “solarpunk”, but so far, that’s mostly just an artistic aesthetic rather than a fully fleshed-out future vision. Singapore has cool-looking plants on buildings, but otherwise it’s just a pretty standard cyberpunk metropolis.

But Skander Garroum makes a convincing case that solarpunk is actually the future of Africa, in a way that cyberpunk was the future of Asia and parts of the U.S.:

Basically, Africa has weak states that aren’t good at providing infrastructure. So solar power is electrifying the continent, because it can be built in a distributed fashion — and because Africa is very sunny, so solar works especially well.

Some excerpts from Skander’s post:

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Carbon credits subsidizing the cost. IoT chips in every device. 90%+ repayment rates on loans to people earning $2/day…

The grid that never came turned out to be a blessing. While development experts spent 50 years debating how to extend 20th-century infrastructure to rural Africa, something more interesting happened: Africa built the 21st-century version instead.

Modular. Distributed. Digital. Financed by the people using it, subsidized by the carbon it avoids.

Cyberpunk was a vision of states coexisting alongside — and sometimes being controlled by — powerful corporations. Perhaps solarpunk is a vision of an anarcho-technological future filled with weak states, where independent individuals and small communities have to take technology into their own hands — a fundamentally African future.

And that’s important, because the future of the human race is the future of Africa:

FINAL THOUGHTS…

The question is whether we’ll see a ‘green Africa’ that is community-driven on these lines – or something a bit more conventional…

We have something just put together by the UN: Africa’s industrial future is within reach: What we need now is intentional investment | Africa Renewal

And by the World Bank: Africa’s Industrial Champions – Why it takes a village to build a continent’s future

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