New plants in Egypt and Tanzania will lift African module manufacturing to 3.5 GW in 2026, according to Ember. Most of the new output will go to the US export market.
Africa is starting to build the solar panels it installs. A report from the think tank Ember and Africa Tech Futures Lab says module manufacturing capacity will quadruple this year to 3.5 GW. The jump comes from 2 GW of new plants in Egypt and around 500 MW in Tanzania. Morocco, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria and Kenya add a further 1 GW between them.
The numbers carry a health warning. Public data on African solar manufacturing is thin, the report says, and the largest factories keep a low profile. Dave Jones, chief analyst at Ember and co-author of the report, explained why. Plants in Egypt, Ethiopia and Tanzania are likely avoiding attention from US authorities trying to curb solar imports.
Built for export
The Egyptian and Tanzanian capacity mainly targets the United States, where tariffs on Chinese goods keep panel prices high. The other six countries serve domestic demand. Even so, up to 94 per cent of panels installed in Africa still come from China.
Trade data hints at what is really going on. Ember’s export tracker shows China shipped 19 GW of cells and 9 GW of wafers to Africa in the 30 months to June 2026. Over the same period Africa made just 2.7 GW of panels. The report reads that gap as re-export. Most of the cells, it thinks, were assembled and shipped on to the US.
That route may soon close. US tariff changes due in December will make imported cells and panels more expensive. If the export channel narrows, the report suggests, the new factories could turn to home markets instead. That would replace Chinese imports and make Africa more self-sufficient.
Cheap Chinese panels are the barrier
Jones is candid about the obstacle. Chinese panels are high quality and sell for around $80 each, which he calls “ridiculously cheap”. Africa imported only $2.4 billion of panels in the past 12 months, so the import bill is small. The value a domestic industry can add is therefore limited. His advice to governments is to approach solar manufacturing cheaply and with a long horizon.
“African countries should be developing an overall cleantech industrial supply chain that seeks to leapfrog the old energy world of ‘import oil and gas, import cars, import power plants’,” Jones said.
The wider picture is that Africa now imports more batteries than panels from China by value. EVs, grid equipment and wind turbines are rising too. The report therefore argues that the whole cleantech supply chain deserves attention, with panels as one piece of it.
A record year for installations
Whatever happens to manufacturing, deployment is booming. Ember expects Africa to install a record 17 GW of solar in 2026, roughly 100,000 panels a day. In addition, 36 of the continent’s 54 countries are on course for a record year. Three quarters of that growth is small-scale solar on rooftops and customer sites. Of the 26 GW added between 2023 and 2025, 20 GW fell into that category.
