KEY POINTS
- BII has committed $20 million to Anzana Electric Group to build small hydropower projects across Africa.
- Anzana expects to deliver 10MW of new distributed baseload generation capacity in Africa by 2030.
- The facility will generate more than 50GWh of clean electricity annually for African national and regional grids.
Small hydropower projects in Africa have a persistent financing problem. The projects work. The technology is proven. But securing long-term debt for anything under 10 megawatts has historically been too slow, too expensive and too uncertain to move at the pace the continent’s energy deficit demands.
British International Investment is trying to change that equation. The UK’s development finance institution has committed a $20 million senior secured portfolio debt facility to Anzana Electric Group, a company building run-of-river hydropower projects across East, Central and Southern Africa. The deal was announced this week.
The facility is designed to reduce the upfront costs and long timelines that typically come with arranging project-specific financing for smaller plants. By providing construction financing against a portfolio of well-developed projects, BII allows Anzana to move faster across multiple sites rather than negotiating a separate deal for each one. The first project under the facility is expected to be in Zambia.
What Anzana is building
Anzana’s model spans the full power value chain, from generation through distribution to customer connections. The company focuses on small and medium-scale hydropower with potential solar hybridization, targeting national and regional grids as well as high-demand industrial and commercial customers. Through this facility, Anzana expects to unlock 10 megawatts of newly installed distributed baseload generation capacity by 2030, generating more than 50 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity every year.
Brian Kelly, Anzana Electric Group’s CEO, described the facility as a milestone in the company’s expansion. “Through an end-to-end model spanning generation and distribution, including customer connections, we ensure consistent reliability and quality across the full power value chain,” he said. “Our focus on strong governance, disciplined execution, and strategic corridor development allows us to deliver power where it is needed most.”
BII’s Africa energy push
Chris Chijiutomi, Managing Director and Head of Africa at BII, framed the investment around the scale of Africa’s energy access gap. Nearly 600 million people on the continent still have no access to electricity. “We’re committed to working with partners like Anzana to support Mission 300 and provide electricity access to 300 million people in Africa by 2030,” he said.
BII has committed that at least 40 percent of its total new commitments by value between 2026 and 2031 will be in climate finance. The institution holds investments in more than 1,600 businesses across 66 countries with total net assets of £9.87 billion. The Anzana facility sits within a broader portfolio of African energy access deals that BII has been building as part of its contribution to the Mission 300 initiative, a joint World Bank Group and African Development Bank effort to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by the end of the decade.
