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The African Development Bank (AfDB) has approved a ten-year strategy to support energy development across African countries, according to statement issued on Saturday by Africa’s foremost multilateral development finance institution.

The AfDB said the strategy – tagged "2016-2025 Strategy for the New Deal on Energy for Africa" – aims to spur the transformation of Africa's energy sector by increasing energy production; scaling-up energy access; improving affordability, reliability and energy efficiency as well as the sustainability of energy systems.

With over 645 million people in Africa without access to electricity and some 730 million reliant on biomass for cooking, the AfDB’s New Deal on Energy for Africa is focused on seven themes that address the areas that are holding back the development of the continent’s energy sector.

The strategic themes are: (i) setting up the right enabling policy environment; (ii) enabling utility companies for success; (iii) dramatically increasing the number of bankable energy projects; (iv) increasing the funding pool to deliver new projects; (v) supporting 'bottom of the pyramid' energy access programmes; (vi) accelerating major regional projects and driving integration; and (vii) rolling out waves of country-wide energy 'transformations'.

The AfDB said it intends to address these themes through a series of flagship programmes such as: Independent Power Producers (IPP) procurement, renewable energy, energy efficiency, power utility transformation, early stage project support facility, bottom of the pyramid energy financing, regional project acceleration, country-wide energy sector turnarounds, and transformative partnerships.

In recent years, the AfDB has developed a significant energy sector portfolio with over 100 active projects. The volume of the Bank's energy sector approvals from 2006-2015 amounts to about $15 billion. At the end of 2015, the AfDB’s energy sector portfolio stood at over $12 billion.