Africa’s solar panel manufacturing output is set to quadruple in 2026, reaching around 3,500MW as two large new plants ramp up in Egypt and Tanzania, according to new analysis from Ember and the African Tech Futures Lab. Almost none of that capacity is destined for African roofs.
Egypt’s EliTe Solar began production at Ain Sokhna at the start of the year, a $115 million complex pairing 2,000MW of cell capacity with 3,000MW of module assembly.
Tanzania’s Tanzol plant at Kibaha, reportedly relocated from Vietnam and China, is now running too, though no capacity figure has been officially confirmed.
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Built for tariff arbitrage, not local rooftops
The reason has little to do with African demand. Both plants are aimed predominantly at the US, where tariffs on Chinese-origin panels make African-manufactured product commercially attractive by comparison.
Meanwhile, 94% of the panels actually installed on African rooftops in 2026 are still imported directly from China.
That export orientation makes Africa’s manufacturing boom a poor proxy for its installation boom — the two numbers are barely related.
It also leaves the new plants’ business case exposed to changes in US trade policy, rather than to anything happening in African energy markets.
That exposure is about to be tested. New US tariffs on solar cells and panels take effect on 1 December 2026, raising the cost of exports from Egypt, Tanzania and Ethiopia’s cell-and-wafer operations into the American market.
At the same time, China removed its 9% export VAT rebate in April, lifting Chinese panel prices by 4–8% and narrowing the cost gap between imported and African-made panels sold locally.
The combined effect could redirect African-made panels back towards African rooftops for the first time — not by design, but because the export premium that justified building for the US market is shrinking from both directions at once.
The data trail raises questions of its own
Chinese customs data adds a further complication. China exported roughly 10 times as many solar cells and wafers to Africa as the continent’s plants have manufactured into finished panels over the past two-and-a-half years — 28GW of cells and wafers against just 2.7GW of manufactured output.
While some of that gap reflects genuine ramp-up still to come, the report’s authors believe most of it is re-shipment, most likely destined for the US, rather than material actually processed in Africa.
Ethiopia imports cells despite having no panel-manufacturing capacity to convert them; Tanzania and Kenya have received large shipments of wafers despite neither having a plant that can use them at all.
Local value-add, such as in Egypt, which is manufacturing cells using new production lines, a step beyond simple assembly, but real-use cases remain shallow.
No solar glass is manufactured anywhere on the continent, and materials from backsheet to junction boxes are still imported. The African market can look to India as a good example of building an industrial strategy for solar and batteries, as it is one of the few countries to have successfully scaled supply chains that can compete on price with China.
Download the report: The take-off in African solar that official statistics can’t yet see
