Decarbonizing Transportation in Africa: A Unique Opportunity

The transport sector typically accounts, depending on the country, for about 25% of global energy-related co2emissions. Africa offers many opportunities for decarbonizing transport.

Indeed, the continent has the lowest motorization rate in the world (42 people per 1,000 own a car).

This contrasts with EUs (560 passengers’ car out per 1000 inhabitants) where the highway network has been built out such that everyone relies on owning a car and where it is now very difficult to encourage people to give up their cars and use alternative modes of transport.

This means that with the right investments in public transport, mobility and urban planning, Africa has many opportunities to avoid the trap that many Western countries have fallen into.

With personal car ownership still very low, there is much room to improve public transport through shared taxis, motorbikes and buses, so that people are not encouraged to buy cars. Here below are some trends on the continent:

 The two- to three-Wheelers or the motorbikes space represents a huge potential in many African countries. It’s very common mode of transport and there are many more of these vehicles on the road in Africa than anywhere else.

One of the advantages of two-wheelers is their economics from the user’s point of view, as the upfront cost is lower than that of a car or bus and the amount of electricity needed to charge an electrified motorbike battery is not very large.

Another trend in Africa is electric buses. After experimenting with BRTs in several African countries, new trends in electric bus implementation are emerging. Indeed, the electric mass transit bus, the “Roam Rapid”, has been introduced in Kenya and several other pilot projects are present in South Africa and Nigeria.

However, this sector is struggling to scale up, mainly due to the high upfront cost of the technologies and the limited integrated infrastructure to support the adoption of electric vehicles.

Most of the investments in the transport sector in Africa have been dedicated to large infrastructure projects such as the construction of highways, airports, port terminals, energy facilities, etc. However, today, some of the investments need to be directed towards start-ups to support innovation related to electric mobility.

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