Ghana has achieved an electricity access rate of 89.03 percent, a figure that represents one of sub-Saharan Africa’s more creditable electrification records. But the 10.97 percent that remains unserved, approximately 3.5 million people concentrated in remote, island, and lakeside communities, represents a population that the national grid is structurally unlikely to reach within any realistic timeframe, and the financing model that could serve them is still not working well enough.
Energy and Green Transition Minister John Abdulai Jinapor laid out the problem with candour at a National Forum on Microgrids and Minigrids for Off-Grid Electrification held in Accra on Thursday, February 19, 2026. “Financing remains a hurdle. High costs and risks deter private players,” he said, acknowledging that his ministry was responding with stable policy and regulatory frameworks, de-risking instruments, targeted capacity building, and broader market support measures while keeping affordability and social inclusion at the centre of the strategy.
The gap between ambition and investment is well documented. Research published in the Energy Conversion and Management journal identified 22 distinct barriers to minigrid deployment in Ghana, with political barriers ranking as the most significant obstacle at 44.3 percent, followed by economic and financing constraints, underscoring that the problem is not purely about capital availability but equally about regulatory predictability and consistency in government commitment.
The minister described microgrids and minigrids powered by solar, biomass combined heat and power, battery storage, and hybrid systems as the only cost-effective means of reaching Ghana’s remaining unserved population, stressing that decentralised systems offer reliable electricity, reduced emissions, lower fossil fuel dependence, and local economic stimulus that grid extension simply cannot replicate for hard-to-reach communities.
He drew a clear line between electrification as a statistic and electrification as a development instrument. “Electricity that ignores livelihoods, industry, and services fails to transform,” he said, calling for microgrid-based energy parks to be designed from the outset to link power supply to agro-processing, cold storage, irrigation, healthcare delivery, education, and small-scale manufacturing rather than limiting their scope to household lighting.
The forum, chaired by former Minister for Power Kwabena Donkor, reviewed progress under two key delivery vehicles. The Africa Energy Parks (AEP) initiative has already demonstrated the model at Jang in the Savannah Region, where a renewable energy park now supplies reliable power to more than 500 households while supporting productive economic activity and climate resilience. The Scaling-Up Renewable Energy Programme (SREP) has been supporting solar mini-grids and solar home systems across additional off-grid communities.
European Union Delegation Team Leader for Infrastructure and Sustainable Development Paulina Różycka was direct in her assessment, describing microgrids and minigrids not as optional alternatives but as a necessity for reaching isolated communities, and endorsing the Africa Energy Parks model as a replicable framework for scaling decentralised renewable energy across the country.
The forum concluded with a mandate to produce actionable recommendations, secure stakeholder endorsement of the Africa Energy Parks model, and deepen collaboration among government, the private sector, and development partners to accelerate deployment of decentralised renewable energy at national scale. Whether that output translates into a meaningful shift in the financing environment will determine whether Ghana’s last 3.5 million unserved citizens move closer to power in 2026 or remain waiting.
