The African Development Bank has approved $302.9 million in concessional financing for a 1,373-kilometre electricity interconnection between Mauritania and Mali, with construction now underway on the first 184km section after project contracts were signed in April.
The bank confirmed the signing of three implementation contracts with SOGEM — the Manantali Energy Management Company, a regional utility created by member states of the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du fleuve Sénégal (OMVS), the Senegal River Basin Development Organization — clearing the way for work to begin on the 225kV corridor known as PIEMM.
Two of the three contracts cover construction: a 114km double-circuit line between Kiffa and Tintane, and a 70km extension from Tintane to Aioun that reinforces Mauritania’s national grid and extends supply into underserved areas.
The third contract covers supervision and monitoring. Together they account for the first 184km of a corridor planned to run to 1,373km with 600MW of transfer capacity between the two countries.
SOGEM Chief Executive Julien Charles Bernard Sagna signed the contracts alongside the contracting companies at a ceremony attended by Mauritania’s Minister of Energy and Petroleum Mohamed Ould Khaled, Minister of Economic Affairs and Development Abdallah Ould Souleymane Cheikh Sidiya, and the bank’s country manager for Mauritania, Malinne Blomberg.
The full programme carries an estimated cost of $888 million. The African Development Fund (ADF) — the bank’s concessional lending window — approved $302.9 million in loan co-financing, split as $269.6 million for Mauritania and $33.3 million for Mali, with climate funds and other partners covering the balance. Implementation runs from January 2024 to December 2030.
A 50MW solar plant at Kiffa, connected directly into the interconnection, forms part of the scheme. The bank projects the programme will reach approximately 2.2 million people in Mauritania — 52% of them women — and connect 100,000 new households along the route: 80,000 in Mauritania across 150 agro-pastoral localities and 20,000 in Mali.
The project sits within the Desert to Power initiative, launched in 2019 to develop 10 gigawatts of solar capacity across 11 Sahel countries stretching from Senegal to Djibouti, and contributes to Mission 300, the bank’s broader drive to expand electricity access across Africa.
The choice of delivery vehicle is notable. Rather than routing construction through either country’s national utility, the project is being built by SOGEM — a river basin authority originally established to operate the Manantali hydropower scheme, which has since developed rural electrification projects across Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania.
The arrangement offers a working model for how cross-border energy infrastructure can be financed and built in a region where national utilities often lack the balance sheet or mandate to lead regional projects.
For the broader Sahel, where energy poverty remains acute and grid connectivity between neighbours is limited, the corridor represents one of the more concrete steps yet taken under the Desert to Power framework — moving from planning into ground-level construction.
