Over the 12 months to June 2025, imports of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels into Africa reached record levels, driven overwhelmingly by Chinese exports. The scale is striking: total panel imports to the continent hit roughly 15 gigawatts (GW) in the year to June 2025, a 60 per cent increase on the prior 12 months, and when South Africa is excluded, other African markets alone imported about 11.2 GW, roughly three times the volume of two years earlier. These raw flows are not just freight statistics; they are the material basis for an expanding mix of utility-scale farms, mini-grids, and distributed rooftop and household systems across Egypt, Senegal, Mali, Somalia, and more.
The headline figures about 15 GW of PV panels landed on the continent in the year to June 2025 and 11.2 GW excluding South Africa, tell two things at once. First, demand for solar modules is no longer concentrated in a handful of larger markets but is spreading geographically, including to countries that have historically imported little or no PV at scale. Second, the pace of growth is breath-taking: outside South Africa, imports nearly tripled compared with two years prior, suggesting both a surge in small-to-medium projects and a maturing supply chain for larger utility projects.
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Where the Growth is Happening
This is a continental phenomenon with particularly rapid uptake in countries from North Africa to the Sahel and Horn regions. Egypt and Morocco continue to anchor large-scale utility deployments in North Africa, while West and East African states such as Senegal, Mali, and Somalia have recorded big year-on-year rises in imports, the latter two notable given long-standing conflict and fragility in parts of their territories. In fact, at least 20 African countries set new annual import records in the year to June 2025, and the number of countries importing at least 100 megawatts rose sharply from 15 to 25. These patterns indicate a move beyond one-off demonstration projects to broader market adoption.
Why Chinese Exports Matter
Chinese manufacturers supply the bulk of the world’s PV modules; cheaper unit prices and intensive production have made Chinese-made panels the default choice for cash-constrained developers and governments. The recent import wave reflects both falling module costs and an active push by Chinese manufacturers to diversify markets as demand cools in some Western economies. The result is a price-competitive supply of modules that many African project developers find hard to resist.
What Kinds of Projects Are Being Built
The imports are powering a mix of project types. In North Africa, state-backed and commercial utility-scale projects continue to expand grid-connected capacity. In sub-Saharan Africa the growth story is more mixed: there is a sizeable increase in utility and mini-grid projects, but a major and rapidly growing share of imports are feeding distributed solutions, rooftop systems for businesses, solar home systems and pay-as-you-go kits for households, and small commercial off-grid plants. That distributed dimension is crucial: in countries where grid coverage is sparse or unreliable, solar PV paired with batteries or hybrid diesel replacement systems provides immediate, bankable improvements in access and productivity.
Impacts on Energy Access and Economics
The immediate effect is increased capacity to provide electricity where traditional grid investment has lagged. Off-grid and distributed solar systems directly lower the cost of electricity for small businesses and households, often replacing expensive diesel generation or enabling hours of productive activity previously constrained by blackouts. For utilities and system planners, the rise in imported modules helps accelerate capacity additions, but it does not by itself solve problems of transmission, system integration, or long-term grid planning. Many African grids still rely heavily on fossil fuel generation, and solar (alongside wind) represented a relatively small share of continental generation as recently as 2023.
Finance, Policy, and the Bottlenecks to Scale
Cheap panels reduce one barrier, but finance remains the central constraint. Utility-scale projects need long-term financing and bankable offtake contracts; distributed systems require working-capital finance and customer-financing models such as pay-as-you-go, leasing, or micro-loans. Despite the record imports, Africa is still far from meeting the African Union’s renewable ambitions, which envision hundreds of gigawatts by 2030. Limited access to affordable capital, higher local costs for balance-of-system components, and thin domestic supply chains constrain faster project completion. Attempts by some countries to restrict cheap imports in order to promote local assembly or protect nascent industries have been politically fraught; Nigeria’s short-lived proposal to ban imported panels is one recent example of the tension between industrial strategy and affordability.
Geopolitics and Industrial Strategy
The expansion of Chinese exports has geopolitical dimensions. As Europe and the United States reconsider their supply chains and sometimes restrict or diversify their PV procurement, Chinese manufacturers have doubled down on other markets. For African governments and investors, that creates a choice between low-cost imports that accelerate deployment now and more ambitious industrial policies to capture value domestically. Several countries and regional initiatives are exploring local assembly or manufacturing, but moving beyond assembly to competitive manufacturing requires cheaper, consistent access to inputs, scale, skilled labour and large anchor contracts, conditions still rare in Africa today.
Environmental and Social Trade-offs
More panels shipped to Africa obviously reduce the need for fossil fuel generation additions and can cut local pollution from diesel generators. But the rush to import also raises lifecycle questions: who installs and maintains systems properly; what happens at end-of-life for panels; and can supply-chain transparency be ensured so projects are not saddled with substandard components? Addressing these issues requires stronger regulations, standards, local training, and nascent recycling markets policy actions that many African states will need to prioritise as deployment scales.
Outlook: From Imports to an African Solar Industry?
The immediate outlook is straightforward: unless global market dynamics change materially, imports will continue to be an important part of how Africa adds solar capacity in the near term. The deeper question is whether those imports catalyse the next phase — local assembly, job creation, and a broader industrial ecosystem, or remain a one-way flow of panels with value captured elsewhere. Policy choices, access to finance, and international partnerships to support local content and skills will determine which path wins out. If current import trends are any guide, the continent’s solar landscape in 2026–2028 will look very different from just a few years ago: more distributed generation, larger utility projects in select markets, and a more diverse set of countries hosting meaningful solar capacity.
