Thirteen priority countries are set to benefit from a new financing mechanism, African Transition Acceleration Fund (ATAF), designed to accelerate Africa’s energy transition, as the pan-African private equity fund is preparing to deploy its first investment. Managed by African Infrastructure Investment Managers, the fund reached a strategic milestone in March with a first $200 million capital raise, backed by institutional partners including Allied Climate Partners, FSD Africa Investments, the International Finance Corporation and Proparco.
The initiative responds to a structural infrastructure financing gap in Africa estimated at nearly $100 billion annually, a shortfall made more striking by the rapid expansion of the clean-technology market, valued at $25 billion in 2024 with potential to reach $200 billion by decade’s end. Despite these prospects, many large-scale projects struggle to move past early design phases, held back by discouraging regulatory frameworks, high development risks, uneven institutional capacity and genuine difficulty structuring bankable proposals; private capital currently represents only about 14 percent of climate-related flows on the continent.
ATAF aims to address this gap by positioning itself early in the development cycle, at the precise moment when a project’s future viability takes shape. For its launch, the fund is targeting 13 priority countries, namely Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
In these high-potential markets, ATAF’s intervention will take the form of equity or quasi-equity stakes in close to 14 specialized companies or platforms, with individual investment tickets ranging between $10 million and $30 million. Deployed over a ten-year period, the strategy aims to build a pipeline of solid projects and accelerate concrete solutions organised around three priority areas: clean electricity, decarbonized molecules and sustainable transport.