● Principal Secretary, Ministry of Energy and Petroleum Dr. Eng. Joseph Njoroge
● World Bank Senior Economist, Sudeshna Ghosh Banerjee
● KETRACO Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Fernandes Barasa
● Ladies and gentlemen,

I am pleased to be here today at the start of this important initiative in the history of Kenya’s power sector. I wish to start off by thanking the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum for the great work they have done over the past couple of years in developing the country’s electricity sub-sector.

Kenya’s power system is indeed the regional leader in providing adequate, reliable, cost-effective and secure electricity supply. The country has also recorded one of the fastest rates of electricity access in the world, thanks to the leadership of the ministry and other sector stakeholders.

The transmission grid is the backbone of a country’s power system, and its development has to always stay ahead of the growth in demand to ensure secure and reliable electricity supply. Developing the transmission infrastructure is capital intensive, and many developing countries have to depend on significant levels of support from development partners to grow their infrastructure. To meet the Kenya government’s “Vision 2030” of increasing generation and transforming Kenya into a “newly industrialized, middle-income” country will require massive investment in the transmission infrastructure.

Over the last year, Power Africa, with its partners, has worked closely with the Government of Kenya and various actors in the power sector to understand the challenges which may hinder the achievement of the country’s energy sector goals and brainstorm on possible solutions for overcoming these challenges.

This effort was spearheaded by a team of Chief Executives who formed an Energy Finance Steering Committee. The committee’s work led to a set of 10 implementation recommendations to address challenges and bridge what we believed was a significant financing gap in the power sector. Power Africa estimates that there is a funding gap of between $14-18 billion to meet Kenya’s energy sector goals by 2025, including power generation, transmission, distribution and off-grid access. Of this amount, the funding gap for transmission infrastructure was estimated at $800,000 to $1.8 billion.

The Government of Kenya, through the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum and with the personal support of the Cabinet Secretary and Principal Secretary, supported these recommendations and directed all of us involved in the sector to move ahead and take action. Power Africa's support in Kenya has been aligned to these recommendations.

One of these recommendations was to develop a build-own-transfer model to shift the financing requirement for transmission lines from the public to the private sector.
We are therefore excited to partner with the World Bank to host this workshop and help implement this recommendation.

Kenya has always had a progressive approach to partnering with the private sector and this effort is another example of the pioneering approach of the Kenyan government in the power sector. We are not aware of another build-own-transfer model applied at scale in Africa. We look forward to partnering with the government as it moves forward in this ground-breaking process to further develop the energy sector, raise its standard of excellence, and bring cleaner and less-expensive power to the Kenyan people.

You will hear today that there is gap in spending on infrastructure to support Africa's growth; primarily driven by inadequate financing. The issue is not the lack of financing; rather, it is the availability of bankable projects that makes it attractive for the private sector to invest. At the same time, the private sector must take on some risk and not expect Governments to bear all the risks and guarantees.

McKinsey & Company – a Power Africa consultant – recently carried out research on Africa's growth potential. The findings indicated that infrastructure spending across the continent needs to increase from $80 billion a year to $150 billion a year by 2025, primarily on transport and power. This will require an increase in the use of public-private partnership approaches. McKinsey estimated that Africa's use of public-private partnership models is four times less than other emerging markets. There is clearly an opportunity for successful implementation of public-private partnerships in the transmission infrastructure in the country.

I hope that the next 2 days will be characterized by a learning attitude, a bias to action and a commitment to find pragmatic solutions suitable for Kenya. The ability of the country to meet its energy sector goals will depend, to a large extent, on the outcome of this consultative workshop.

I am sure that this collective group can achieve that.

Asanteni sana.