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The Trump administration has dismantled Power Africa, a U.S.-led initiative to accelerate investment in African energy that was coordinated by the U.S. Agency for International Development. But that doesn’t mean the program’s mission is dead. In fact, its ambitions and approach might be more relevant than ever.

I worked at Power Africa, including as its acting deputy coordinator, for six years — two years under President Obama and four years under President Trump during his first term. Watching my former agency be destroyed has been incredibly painful. It has also raised serious doubts as to whether the U.S. can still be a credible energy partner for African countries.

But I have hope that the U.S. commitment to African energy will be revived for two reasons:

Power Africa’s private sector approach resonates with this administration. In designing Power Africa, the U.S. explicitly rejected aid models that donated energy equipment to communities and hospitals. Such efforts were unsustainable, unworkable and frequently divorced from local needs. Instead, it assembled a network of private partners — including investors, energy developers and equipment suppliers — that wanted to do more business in Africa but needed support from the public sector.

The Trump administration has made clear it prefers this type of market-driven approach over traditional “aid.” It has dismantled USAID while signaling its intention to significantly scale up the work of the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a federal agency that invests in commercial projects, primarily in lower-income economies.

Senior Trump administration officials have also spoken publicly about the importance of expanding energy access, including in Africa. “If you get energy wrong, nothing else matters,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright at the Powering Africa Summit in Washington, D.C. in early March. Wright went on to emphasize the U.S. government’s commitment to scaling up African energy.

Power Africa’s mandate is strategic. If the mission of U.S. support for economic growth has been narrowed to enabling commercial investment, it’s difficult to identify a sector more strategic than energy. The U.S. launched Power Africa in 2013 for one simple reason: electricity is key to economic growth and job creation. Today, roughly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa fully lack power and millions more can only access unreliable or prohibitively expensive electricity, making it impossible to build businesses, compete in global industries or power the growth that ultimately enables countries to end dependence on foreign aid.

Energy investment frequently tops the list of priorities for businesses and policymakers, which should make it a priority for this administration’s efforts to counter Chinese influence. And it presents diverse opportunities for U.S. technology and commercial interests.

But no initiative is perfect — and neither was Power Africa. If the Trump administration wants to supercharge African energy investment (and I hope it does), we must seize the opportunity to make U.S. efforts more effective, agile and responsive to the needs of the private sector and African partners. Here are a few ideas for how to do that:

1. Revive support for market development. It’s great that the administration wants DFC to do more. But DFC won’t be able to drive investment in challenging markets on its own. What’s been lost with USAID’s demise is the upstream support that helped build functional, competitive markets capable of attracting private sector interest. For example, USAID helped African governments improve contracts, make energy procurement more transparent and competitive and improve the creditworthiness of electric utilities. In turn, this work allowed U.S. finance agencies to do more energy deals and attract more private capital. These capabilities must be recreated — at the State Department or elsewhere.
2. Expand MCC’s energy mandate. The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a U.S. agency that helps countries overcome barriers to economic growth, is well-placed to help strengthen energy sectors in the highest priority markets and is the only agency currently capable of supporting the public electricity infrastructure crucial to long-term investment. Plus, it has a track record of doing so with robust analytics and accountability. Its mandate could be expanded to lead U.S. agencies in partnering on energy innovation and reform with key African allies.
3. Help developers get all the way to operation. Power Africa focused primarily on helping energy deals secure financing. DFC does the same. But this is only one piece of the puzzle. Projects run into all sorts of other obstacles including licensing, regulatory issues and construction delays. For high-priority projects, the U.S. should deploy project development experts to help partners overcome these challenges.

Power Africa enjoyed strong bipartisan support throughout its existence because it demonstrated a model for U.S. leadership that partnered private investment with global engagement and diplomacy. The program may no longer exist, but the services it provided can be reestablished and reinvented for a new era.