Anaerobic digestion works efficiently in conditions of 30–40°C. Below 15°C, you have to use expensive heating to get the process going. Most of Africa sits in or around that ideal temperature range for most of the year. So, theoretically we could run these systems on a close-to-passive level across most of the continent.
South Africa has the continent’s most established bio-digestion sector:
- Bio2Watt’s biogas plant at Bronkhorstspruit (supplying Rosslyn) has been operational since October 2015, running on cattle manure and organic waste to generate about 4.6MW under a 10-year power purchase agreement with BMW’s Rosslyn plant. It expanded to 9.8MW in 2023, processing at least 240,000 tonnes of organic waste a year and supplying South African Breweries.
- Bio2Watt’s second site, at the Vyvlei Dairy Farm near Malmesbury (4.8MW, cattle manure plus municipal organic waste), is under construction.
- Green Create operates industrial-scale anaerobic digestion plants converting agro-industrial effluent and organic waste into biogas, electricity, heat, and fertiliser at sites including Rustenburg.
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Anaerobic digesters around Africa
Mauritius has a few distinct projects:
- Green Create operates an anaerobic digestion and wastewater treatment plant in Mauritius that converts fish processing effluent into renewable biogas and clean water;
- A biogas plant at the New Wing Prison in Beau Bassin supported by the UNDP-GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) and the Mauritius Research and Innovation Council (MRIC), processing 30kg of biodegradable waste daily; and
- A separate, government-led municipal facility — designed to process 100 tonnes/day of household, hotel and market organic waste into roughly 1.5–2 MWh of daily electricity — was still in procurement as of 2025.
Sierra Leone has small but genuinely operating anaerobic digestors through Freetown Waste Transformers, which deploys modular bio-digester units (50–150kW each) converting food waste into electricity, heat and fertiliser. Also:
- A pilot has run at Freetown’s Aberdeen Women’s Centre since 2022, with plans to scale toward a 40-unit network.
- Freetown’s much larger, separately announced 30MW/365,000-tonne-a-year “waste-to-energy” plant is a different, thermal-incineration project, not bio-digestion.
Ghana
- The country commissioned a hybrid plant at Gyankobaa (Ashanti Region) in May 2022. It produced 400kW total, of which 100kW comes specifically from anaerobic digestion of municipal waste, the rest from solar and plastic pyrolysis.
- Ghana’s other major waste-to-power project, the 60MW Armech plant at Tema, is a mass-burn incinerator, not a digestor.
Uganda
- Homeklin’s biogas plant in Kampala launched in February 2026, converting source-separated household organic waste (via KCCA’s free-collection-for-separated-waste scheme) into biogas for cooking, lighting and vehicle fuel, plus liquid biofertiliser.
Kenya has more activity in planning than in operation:
- In operation for a decade, the 4MWGorge Farm Energy Park / Biojoule Thermal Power Station, Naivasha, Nakuru County (with 2MW committed to Kenpower) is a bio-digestor waste-to-energy plant using agricultural/horticultural crop waste, and by most accounts the first of its kind in Africa to connect to a national grid.
- Nairobi’s Umoja Estate community biogas project (food and animal waste, aiming to serve 5,000+ households) has been in development since 2018;
- A Kisumu biogas project backed by the EIB and GIZ remains at the feasibility-study stage; and
- The proposed 12MW Kabira Waste-to-Energy plant (biogas/ethanol from Nairobi’s municipal waste) is still negotiating its power purchase agreement rather than operating.
- Dandora (45MW) and Kakamega (10MW) are both thermal incineration plants, not bio-digestors.
Rwanda
- The pilot bio-waste treatment facility at the Nduba site near Kigali (inaugurated June 2024) processes 5 tonnes/day of organic waste, but produces compost rather than biogas or electricity — so it sits adjacent to, rather than inside, the bio-digestion-for-energy category;
- A separate landfill-gas-to-energy feasibility study for the same Nduba site was still being commissioned as of 2025.
Have you read? Where is waste-to-energy going in Africa?
Why don’t we use anaerobic biodigesters as a matter of course?
The projects clearly exist, but why then do we not use them more extensively?
Because a successful anaerobic digestion project needs a homogeneous feedstock, and most municipal-level African landfills are filled with mixed rubbish.
A study published in 2026, Many biogas systems in Africa fail due to poor project and engineering design: Insights from Southern Malawi, found that none of the bio-digestion projects in the country achieved complete success.
Most were abandoned or barely functional, and the study traced this not to the technology itself but to:
- fragmented engineering knowledge,
- improvised, unstandardised construction,
- undersized digesters,
- missing effluent disposal, and
- no post-installation training or support.
The study Optimization of biogas production using municipal solid waste in sub Saharan Africa: a systematic review shows that Sub-Saharan African studies reinforced the waste sorting idea: co-digestion and controlled retention times can lift methane yield 25–40%, but that’s contingent on consistent, known feedstock — not mixed municipal rubbish.
In the final analysis, anaerobic digestion is technically well-suited to Africa’s climate and has proven itself at commercial/industrial scale wherever there is a concentrated feedstock and committed buyer for the electricity or gas.
But it performs less reliably at the general municipal or household scale because of the lack of source separation, training and financing, not because the idea is a bad fit for the continent. ESI
