Reading the register.
Reading the register.
Intelligence with context. Foresight that shapes decisions. The DIWAN register publishes commissioned studies, briefings, and market intelligence across sectors and jurisdictions.
Where private capital can earn a return on electricity access in Ethiopia: captive industrial solar, anchor-load mini-grids and, later, utility-scale PPPs
Ethiopia has doubled generation to 9,752 MW, but only 44% of households reach Tier 1 supply and rural access is 56%. The tariff reform of 2024-28 has pushed the industrial tariff above the utility's own cost of service, which makes captive solar-plus-storage the first bankable entry. Mini-grids under the new NEP 3.0 are investable when they are tender-led and anchored on productive use. Utility-scale IPPs are the largest prize but should come last, until a private PPA reaches operation and currency convertibility improves.
Why the Indode rail-side dry port is the country’s most PPP-ready logistics bottleneck, and what it takes to make the investor case bankable
Ethiopia routes about 90–95% of its trade through Djibouti and pays an estimated US$1.5–2bn a year in port-related fees, with logistics costs above 20% of GDP. Of the five candidate bottlenecks (sea port, roads, railway terminals, dry ports and customs), the Indode intermodal rail terminal, dry port and logistics centre is the most PPP-ready: it is the only logistics asset in a formal DBFOM process (an expression-of-interest call in July 2025, with a reported 25–30-year concession), rail freight rose 78% to 3.2 Mt in 2025, and foreign ownership caps in multimodal transport and freight forwarding were removed in 2026. An illustrative US$75m first phase returns about 11% unlevered in US dollars, so bankability depends on a logistics-centre layer, dollar-indexed tariffs, anchor volumes and DFI debt whose repayments follow the ramp-up.
Uganda's power problem has moved from generation to delivery. Installed capacity reached about 2,048 MW in 2024 against a 2025 system peak of about 1,351 MW, but 44.7% of people still lack access, losses run near 17% and manufacturers report frequent outages. The 2030 National Energy Compact targets 85% access, US$17.7 billion of investment (US$9.4 billion private) and 2,712 mini-grids from a base
Read this studyPhoto: Kia Sheikhy