By Wentland Muhatiah, Senior Advocacy and Policy Research Officer, ACCESS Coalition
The energy transition and the just energy transition are usually treated as two camps. Both would get further by keeping one set of books.
At the IMF–World Bank Group Annual Meetings in Bangkok on 13 October, close to a hundred people crowded into a Civil Society Policy Forum session, “The World Bank and Just Transition in an Era of Rupture”. Towards the end, someone asked a question I have been turning over since. How can energy justice follow the money when the conversation is split between people working on the energy transition and people working on a just energy transition?
I don’t think the answer lies in picking a side.
The two groups do exist, and they often talk past each other. One measures progress in megawatts installed, emissions avoided and private capital mobilised. The other asks who gets power, who can pay for it, who was consulted and who bears the cost. Finance ministries and investors tend to listen to the first group. Communities tend to rely on the second, which is often outside the room where decisions are made.
Very few people in either group want a transition that leaves 563 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa without electricity, or nearly a billion people in the region cooking with wood, charcoal and kerosene. Where they really differ is on what gets measured. The people at the centre of the just transition argument rarely appear in the numbers that decide where money goes.
Money follows the metric
In my years working on climate and energy policy, one pattern has held almost everywhere. Finance goes where the scorecard points. A bank rewarded for gigawatts builds gigawatts. A programme judged on connections reports connections. Fairness drops out because nobody is asked to report on it.
The gaps are easy to find. International Energy Agency analysis shows that mini-grids and stand-alone solar are among the most cost-effective ways to reach unconnected households, and that more than half of the investment Africa needs for universal access should go to them. Yet development finance still leans towards large grid projects, which fit the loan structures banks are set up to deliver. The IEA puts the cost of universal access to clean cooking in Africa at about USD 4 billion a year to 2030, and actual investment falls far short of that. Much of the public money that does reach the poorest countries arrives as loans, at a time when around half of Africa’s low-income countries are in or at high risk of debt distress.
Better measurement would fix a good deal of this.
In June 2026, amid pressure from the United States, its largest shareholder, the World Bank retired its target of putting 45% of its financing into projects with climate co-benefits, saying it would complete a shift from inputs to outcomes. The 45% still applies to IDA, the Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, as President Ajay Banga told civil society in Bangkok during the Annual Meetings. Many climate advocates saw this as a step backwards, and they have reason to worry. I also see it as a test. If the Bank intends to be judged on outcomes, the choice of which outcomes count, and for whom, is now open for discussion. Advocates for a just transition should arrive with indicators as well as arguments.
Mission 300 shows why this matters. The joint World Bank and African Development Bank initiative aims to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030, and in June it announced that it had reached more than 50 million people. That ambition deserves support, but the figure needs checking. On 30 June, an ODI analysis by Bright Simons showed that some of the largest country numbers predate the initiative. Simons, a Ghanaian innovator and visiting senior fellow at ODI, found that Tanzania’s 7.5 million connections are “essentially TREEP’s entire cumulative achievement, relabelled”, referring to a rural electrification programme approved in 2016. Ethiopia’s 4.6 million rest on a programme approved in 2018. Speakers in Bangkok put the wider problem simply: a connection is not the same as access. Anyone who wants Mission 300 to succeed should want its numbers to hold up under scrutiny.
Five practical steps
The practical route is to build the questions raised by just transition advocates into systems the development banks already use. Five changes would go a long way.
- Add an access tag to climate tagging. Multilateral development banks already track climate finance using a joint methodology. A second tag could record whether each energy investment reaches energy-poor households, last-mile communities or fragile and conflict-affected states. Every project would then report on the people it serves as well as the emissions it avoids, through a reporting system that is already in place.
- Separate new money from relabelled money. Mission 300 should publish its Compact data every year by country, technology and financing instrument, and show which finance is new and which was already committed. The same level of detail should cover the rest of the energy portfolio, from grid and off-grid solar to clean cooking and gas. Published figures are what will let parliaments, shareholders and citizens trust the results.
- Measure access, not just connections. The World Bank’s own Multi-Tier Framework already rates electricity access on capacity, hours of supply, reliability, quality, affordability, legality, and health and safety. It should be the main yardstick for Mission 300 results, broken down by gender, income and disability. A household with a connection it cannot afford, or power for only a few hours a day, is not yet a success story.
- Match finance to where connections are being made. A dedicated financing window for decentralised energy in Sub-Saharan Africa, which panellists proposed in Bangkok, combined with lending in local currency, would lower the cost of capital for the small companies that reach remote communities. A target of moving towards equal investment in grid and decentralised energy by 2030, with annual milestones, would make progress easy to track.
- Build fairness into financing terms. Setting aside at least 15% of Mission 300 finance for fragile and conflict-affected contexts, on grant and concessional terms, would keep the hardest places from being priced out. At COP31 in Antalya next month, governments should also start treating just transition finance as its own category, separate from adaptation and mitigation. Paying for retraining, social protection and community ownership is different work from building solar farms or sea walls.
All five depend on one further condition. People affected by these investments need to see the plans early, while decisions can still change. Publishing Mission 300 investment plans and giving civil society a formal role in monitoring national Compacts would cost little and would catch problems before they become expensive.
One set of books
Those focused on the speed of the transition have good reason to care about fairness. Projects without local support stall. Mini-grids without customers who can pay go under. Connections that people cannot afford end up as unpaid bills and stranded assets. Fair delivery is part of what makes energy projects bankable and lasting.
Justice advocates, for their part, need to work in the language of finance. Moral arguments get attention. Indicators, tags and reporting templates are what change budgets.
Most of what I have proposed relies on tools the Bank already has. What is missing is a decision to use them this way.
With little more than four years left to reach universal energy access by 2030, the two camps cannot afford to keep separate accounts. For justice to follow the money, it has to be counted alongside it.
