Ghana is setting its sights on becoming West Africa’s leading electricity exporter, with nuclear power as a cornerstone of the plan. Energy and Green Transition Minister John Abdulai Jinapor has announced that Accra is ready to begin supplying electricity to Nigeria — the continent’s most populous nation and one of the region’s largest energy markets.
Ghana already exports power to Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire. Adding Nigeria to that list is no small step: it means scaling up to serve a market of over 200 million people with a chronic and largely unmet demand for electricity. Jinapor framed this move as part of a broader strategy tied to President John Mahama‘s “24-Hour Economy” initiative — a programme that depends on a stable, round-the-clock power supply.
To underpin this ambition, the Ghanaian government has developed an energy mix combining natural gas, renewables, and nuclear power. Nuclear is seen as the component that will provide baseload generation — the steady output that variable sources alone cannot guarantee. The country has drawn up the Ghana Nuclear Power Agenda, a roadmap targeting the construction of its first domestic nuclear power plant. The original 2030 commissioning target has slipped: according to Nuclear Power Ghana Executive Director Stephen Yamoah, that milestone is no longer technically achievable, though construction could begin by 2028. An operational start sometime in the mid-2030s now appears the most likely scenario.
The regional context reinforces the logic behind Ghana’s push. The West African Power Pool (WAPP), a coalition of 14 West African nations, aims to create a unified cross-border electricity market. In that setting, a stable, low-carbon nuclear source in Ghana’s energy portfolio would carry value well beyond its national borders. Projections suggest that Ghana, South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya will account for the bulk of Africa’s nuclear generation capacity by 2040. Ghana and South Africa are already the two sub-Saharan African countries furthest along the path toward nuclear deployment.
In July 2024, the United States and Ghana inaugurated the first regional nuclear energy training centre in Africa, operated by the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission with support from the U.S. Department of Energy. The facility is designed to train technical and regulatory staff — not only from Ghana, but from across the region. It signals that international cooperation on African nuclear development is already operational, not merely aspirational.
Nigeria, for its part, is not standing still. The head of the country’s Rural Electrification Agency recently suggested that Nigeria’s power deficit could be reframed as an investment opportunity, pointing to major tech companies’ deals to source energy from nuclear facilities as a reference model. The backdrop is one of reliable energy demand growing faster than supply. If Ghana succeeds in building out the generation capacity it has in mind, exports to Abuja would represent more than a bilateral agreement — they would demonstrate that a West African nation can serve as an energy anchor for the entire sub-region, with nuclear power as the silent backbone holding the whole system together.
