So far, August 2026 has hit the joint top-spot as the hottest month on record, and individual months just continue to rack up new records. Cooling is one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand worldwide, and Africa is feeling the heat.
Rising incomes and temperatures are driving demand for air-conditioning, refrigeration and cold storage, even as most of the continent’s population still lacks reliable access to electrons and power.
Programmes like Mission 300 are investigating ways to shift the focus of electrification in Africa from basic household consumption like lighting, to powering income-generating and commercial activities through productive use of energy.
Cooling, heating, ventilation and air conditioning can be vital drivers of economic productivity, food security, health and demand-side energy management in these programmes, alongside national grid and overall energy planning across the continent.
Specific to cooling, here are some of the predominant trends Africa is adopting to combat rising temperatures and secure food and energy systems.
Closed-loop data centre cooling
A form of data centre design that recirculates the same coolant (water, a water-glycol mix or a refrigerant) in a sealed loop that pulls heat away from servers and rejects it elsewhere, rather than drawing on an endless supply of fresh water. Diametrically opposed to the more conventional evaporative cooling towers, which lose large volumes of water to evaporation.
Because cooling can account for 30–40% of a data centre’s total energy use, operators adopting closed-loop and liquid-cooling designs have reported cutting cooling electricity use by up to 50% and water use by up to 30% compared with older evaporative approaches.
As hyperscale and edge data centres start making inroads across South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt, cooling strategies will directly shape both grid load and water stress. So, closed-loop systems would help to mitigate water scarcity in already water-stressed regions.
Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS)
This is a pay-as-you-go model for cooling. The customer pays a subscription or usage fee to use the equipment such as air conditioning or refrigeration equipment, which remains under the ownership of the provider who handles installation, maintenance and eventual replacement.
SEforAll says this lets customers “base their investment decision on the lifecycle costs rather than the purchase price of the equipment”.
The provider retaining ownership and responsibility for upkeep is an incentive to install good quality, durable, efficient units rather than go for the cheapest option available.
Elites Project: InspiraFarms Cooling provide cooling-as-a-service
Rwanda’s Coolease scheme, launched in 2019, is an early African example of the concept. They created a technology-leasing arrangement for enterprises that bundles in maintenance.
The IEA lists CaaS among the market-based approaches that can “capture efficiency opportunities and increase deployment of innovative technologies or renewable integration”.
District and urban greening
This is when trees, parks, green roofs and water features are added across an entire city or district, not just to one building, to cool down a whole area. It means expanding vegetation and water features such as green corridors or restored waterways, on a neighbourhood or city scale to counter the urban heat island effect.
UNEP’s Beating the Heat handbook for cities compiles case studies of urban greening — trees, green corridors, restored streams — used deliberately to bring down city temperatures. The IEA calls on governments to “enforce integrated urban planning… that integrate[s] inclusive expansion of green and blue space and district cooling into the urban planning process.”
Of reference: How to address warming in cities: a universal guide
Africa’s cities are urbanising and densifying faster than almost anywhere else, often with very little green space built in. Designing greening into city and district planning now is a comparatively low-cost way to blunt rising urban heat, versus retrofitting an already-built city at some point in the too-hot future.
Energy performance standards
These are the rules that set a minimum efficiency bar for appliances such as air conditioners, so the least efficient units cannot legally be sold.
For example, Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) are mandatory regulations that set out the minimum efficiency an appliance, like a fan, must meet to be legally sold in a market, typically paired with a consumer-facing efficiency label.
The East African Community has adopted regional MEPS for refrigerating appliances and air conditioners though regional regulators note the bloc was “still a dumping ground for inefficient products due to limited compliance with standards” elsewhere.
Without MEPS, African markets can become a destination for older, inefficient or second-hand cooling equipment no longer sellable elsewhere. Standards like the EAC’s ensure new cooling demand is met with efficient equipment from day one, rather than locking in decades of excess electricity use.
Of reference: The dangers of dumping obsolete HVAC systems in Africa
Grid-resilient solar integration
Adding solar power to the grid using energy storage, smart inverters and demand flexibility to strengthen the grid rather than destabilise it. It covers the technologies and system design choices that address renewable energy variability challenges. This includes
- thermal or ice storage that shifts cooling loads to sunlight hours;
- automated controls and solar PV-powered cooling that pairs on-site generation directly with the loads; and
- lowering the risk of outages through self-produced and stored electricity.
At the grid scale, this includes
- battery energy storage systems at distribution and transmission level;
- grid-forming inverters to hold frequency and voltage steady as more solar comes online, and
- market signals such as time-of-use tariffs that rewards flexible, well-time demand.
Many African grids are small and not that well interconnected, so exposure to variable solar capacity that is growing fast off a very low base creates problems. Grid-resilient integration though lets them add gigawatts of new solar without having the resort to localised blackouts or curtailment to keep the grid online.
National Cooling Action Plans
Various governments’ official roadmaps to meet country cooling needs efficiency, without adding to the global climate problem. This is most often a government-led planning document that sets out the coordinated, economy wide approach to cooling, aligned with the country’s broader climate commitments.
As growth in cooling demand ramps up across Africa, national plan gives a government a structured way to get ahead of that expansion, steering the country towards efficient equipment, climate-friendly refrigerants and passive design, rather than reacting once the grid is under strain.
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Natural refrigerants
Cooling fluids found in nature such as ammonia, CO2, hydrocarbons (propane, isobutane), water and air, which are used in place of high-warming synthetic engineered specifically as refrigerant gases. These are gaining ground as alternatives to hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the synthetic refrigerants that still dominate most air conditioners and fridges.
The 2016 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol — ratified by 148 countries as of March 2023 — mandates cutting HFC production and consumption by more than 80% by 2047, pushing the industry toward natural refrigerants and refrigerant-free alternatives such as desiccants and evaporative cooling.
U-3ARC, the industry body representing refrigeration and air conditioning associations across Africa and the Mediterranean, tracks this transition closely through its technician training and certification work.
As cold chains for food, vaccines and data infrastructure start expanding across Africa, the refrigerant choices made today could lock in decades of climate impact. Natural refrigerants are way to build infrastructure without inheriting the high Global Warming Potential technologies that richer economies are now trying to get rid of.
Passive building design
Using a building’s shape, materials and orientation to stay cool naturally, before any machines are switched on. In this way architecture is used, rather than energy-consuming equipment, to limit indoor heat gain.
The IEA notes that “traditional architecture in tropical and sub-tropical climates has used passive cooling approaches including shading (eg verandas), cross-ventilation (eg windows or other openings on opposite walls), and light-coloured building materials” that reflect the sun’s rays.
Where air conditioning is unaffordable or inaccessible to most households, passive design is often the only realistic route to thermal comfort. For the buildings going up across Africa’s fast-growing cities, it is far cheaper to design in from the outset than to retrofit later.
Did you know? SA: 7,000+ buildings register for Energy Performance Certificates
Solar-powered cold rooms
Off-grid refrigerated storage that is run entirely on solar panels and batteries. This is used by farmers who have no mains access to electricity. These small refrigerated storage units are typically only a few square metres large.
SEforAll’s Chilling Prospect reports document cold-storage models such as Nigeria’s ColdHubs, cold-storage models for horticulture in Rwanda and more.
A large share of the food grown in Sub-Sahara Africa is lost after harvest for lack of cold storage. The solar cold rooms can cut post-harvest lost and lift farmer income directly.
Solar-powered vaccine fridges
These run on solar batteries and hold immunisations at safe temperatures without grid-connected electricity. These are purpose-built refrigeration units that stick to a narrow temperature range of 2-8°C and they matter a great deal to the many rural health facilities across Africa with unreliable or no power supply.
For Reference Solar powered refrigerators helping people of Sierra Leone get vaccinated
