REA seeks unified approach to expand electricity access across Nigeria

Officials from government agencies, private sectors and development partners at the event on Monday.

The Rural Electrification Agency has called for a unified approach among government agencies, state governments, development partners, private operators and other stakeholders to accelerate electricity access across Nigeria.

The agency’s Managing Director, Dr Abba Abubakar Aliyu, made the call on Monday at the official relaunch of the Off-Grid Stakeholder Coordination and Partnership Forum held in Abuja.

Aliyu said stronger coordination was necessary to prevent duplication of projects, improve the use of limited resources and ensure that interventions reached Nigerians who needed electricity most.

He said an analysis of the 2024 and 2025 Federal Government budgets using Artificial Intelligence revealed that several government institutions were implementing power-related projects, highlighting the need for better coordination across the sector.

According to him, some of the agencies involved in electricity-related projects were not traditionally regarded as major power-sector institutions.

He said, “If we continue to work the way we currently do without bringing the states into this conversation and coordination, I can tell you that we will simply be planning to fail.”

The REA boss also disclosed that the agency itself had encountered situations where projects under different programmes overlapped at the same locations.

He said the challenge had become more significant as funding for the sector continued to shrink, stressing the need for stakeholders to share data and coordinate interventions to ensure that available resources were used efficiently.

Aliyu said a centralised platform for sector data could help stakeholders identify existing projects, avoid duplication and determine areas requiring new interventions.

In his keynote address, the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, represented by his Chief of Staff, Doyin Adelabu, said fragmentation remained a major challenge to the delivery of electricity projects.

He said, “Fragmentation is the quiet tax every under-coordinated sector pays: in duplicated effort, missed investment opportunities, and slower delivery of power to the Nigerians who need it most.”

Tegbe said the FG was establishing a standing Off-Grid Coordination Secretariat to track commitments and risks, convene issue-based working groups and generate shared market intelligence.

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He called on development partners, financiers, private operators, state governments and civil society organisations to nominate focal points, share data and commitments, and participate actively in the working groups.

The minister said the Federal Ministry of Power would continue to provide policy direction through the National Electrification Strategy and Implementation Plan, while supporting the development of state electricity markets under the Electricity Act.

Earlier, the Executive Director of the Rural Electrification Fund, Doris Uboh-Ogunkoya, said coordination should become a continuous function rather than an activity limited to periodic meetings.

She said the Off-Grid Coordination Secretariat would help stakeholders identify gaps, address bottlenecks and track commitments.

“The aim is not simply to hold more meetings, but to align our efforts, identify gaps, address bottlenecks, and follow through on commitments between meetings,” she said.

Also speaking, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Nigeria representative, Ikenna-Donald Ofoegbu, urged stakeholders to look beyond the number of connections delivered when measuring the success of off-grid electricity interventions.

“For many years, we measured success largely by the number of mini-grids installed, solar home systems deployed, or connections delivered. These indicators remain important. But the next phase requires us to ask a more consequential question: What happens after the connection?” he said.

Ofoegbu called for greater emphasis on productive use of electricity, innovative financing, sustainability and local capacity development.

He said the sector needed to move “from successful interventions to scale; from connections to productive use; from donor-supported projects to investable markets; and from individual programmes to a coordinated national ecosystem.”

The Off-Grid Stakeholder Coordination and Partnership Forum, which began as a donor roundtable in April 2017, is being relaunched under a new coordination framework.

The FG said more than 7.5 million Nigerians had gained electricity access through over 200 solar hybrid mini-grids and about 1.8 million solar home system connections.

The Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-Up programme is targeting an additional 17 million Nigerians and about 465 megawatts of new renewable energy capacity, while Nigeria is also contributing to the broader Mission 300 initiative aimed at connecting 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.