Abidjan – The African Development Bank has launched the African Network of Centers of Excellence in Electricity (ANCEE) in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

Stefan Nalletamby, African Development Bank Acting Vice-President, Operations, in charge of Infrastructure, emphasized the urgent need for Africa to address the human resource capacity gap in the energy sector with focus of the massive investments opportunities that exist.

The energy sector in Africa has suffered from years of inadequate investments in infrastructure and human resources, particularly technicians, engineers and sector managers, creating a major threat to the sustainability of the sector.

He highlighted the alignment of this important initiative with the current strategic approach of the Bank framed around the New Deal on Energy for Africa and the development priority to light up and power Africa.

The African Development Bank is providing a grant of approximately EUR 9.7 million, while the French Development Agency is contributing EUR 3.0 million to the Association of Power Utilities of Africa (ASEA) in order to structure a network of four centers of excellence and to train roughly 9,700 technical and managerial staff of the power utilities, one third of whom are to be women.

This innovative networking approach aims at improving the performance of the power sector and increases the quality of power services.

The selected four centers of excellence are the Eskom Academy of Learning (South Africa), the Kafue Gorge Regional Training Center (Zambia), the Institute de Formation Pour l’Electricité et le Gas (IFEG), and the Centre des Sciences et Technologies en Electricité (Morocco).

The launching meeting was attended by representatives of more than 40 power utilities, the African Union, and the power pools.