Africa’s solar market may be growing faster than government statistics suggest. The problem is that millions of small solar systems are being installed outside the systems governments traditionally use to measure electricity generation. Rooftops, factories, farms, businesses and small mini-grids can come online without ever appearing in the same project-level data used to track large power plants.
Much of this solar is behind the meter or completely off-grid. A factory can install panels to reduce its reliance on the grid. A household can add a rooftop system. A mine can build its own solar-and-storage facility. None of these necessarily sends electricity into the national grid, meaning the utility may have little or no information about the system’s capacity or whether it even exists.
Then there is the way the equipment reaches the market. Solar panels and kits can move through distributors, importers and smaller traders before ending up in thousands of individual installations. There is often no central registry connecting those imported panels to a completed solar project. This creates a growing gap between how much equipment is entering Africa and how much installed capacity governments can officially account for.
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The data problem is substantial. Ember found that only 36 of Africa’s 54 countries have an official national solar-capacity figure, while only 14 reported data for 2025. Just 12 countries report any distributed-solar figures at all. Even where governments do collect the data, the numbers can miss a large part of the market because the systems are too numerous, too small or simply outside formal reporting requirements.
That matters because Africa is increasingly building its electricity system from the bottom up. If governments cannot see the solar being installed, they cannot accurately plan grids, estimate electricity demand, design tariffs or understand where investment is flowing.
