Figures from the Global Solar Council (GSC) suggest that Africa added 4.5GW of new solar PV capacity in 2025, a record for annual additions and a 54% increase over the previous year.
This is the headline takeaway from the GSC’s’ Africa Market Outlook for Solar PV: 2026-2029’, published this week. The report notes that the majority of Africa’s solar deployment is concentrated in a few leading markets—South Africa (1.6GW of new operational capacity), Nigeria (803MW) and Egypt (500MW) lead the top ten in terms of capacity additions, which accounted for 90% of all new capacity added in Africa in 2025—but that “mid-sized and emerging markets” added “substantial new capacity” in 2025.
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Chief among these are Morocco, with 204MW of new capacity added in 2025, and Zambia, with 139MW of new capacity. Indeed, eight countries added at least 100MW of new capacity in 2025, compared to just four in the previous year, suggesting that Africa’s solar sector is perhaps not as reliant on a few leading players for new capacity additions as it has been in other years.
The GSC report also notes that 56% of installed capacity is in the utility-scale sector, while the remaining 44%, in the distributed sector, is “clearly underestimated [and] harder to track”. These challenges in reporting accurate figures for the distributed sector could explain the disparity between the GSC’s figures for 2025 solar installations and those of the African Solar Industry Association (AFSIA), which said in January that Africa added 2.4GW of new capacity in 2025.
Indeed, AFSIA’s figures are not just lower than those of GSC, but are a year-on-year decline, compared to the AFSIA 2024 installation figure of 2.7GW, as opposed to the year-on-year growth indicated by the GSC figures. AFSIA leadership has told PV Tech that tracking accurate deployment data is a challenge in Africa, and that the continent is likely installing more capacity than its figures suggest.
However, both organisations point to growing imports of modules made overseas to Africa as a key driving force behind the capacity additions in 2025. AFSIA CEO John van Zulyen described the scale of Chinese module shipments to Africa as “mind-blowing” upon the launch of AFSIA’s figures last month, and this week, the GSC figures suggested that Africa imported 18.2GW of overseas solar modules in 2025.
