Djibouti’s Green Energy Revolution Not Getting Attention It Deserves

Bor­gen Project

Dji­bouti, locat­ed in East Africa and bor­dered by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Soma­lia, has a pop­u­la­tion of near­ly one mil­lion peo­ple. In 2013, Dji­bouti announced Vision 2035, a com­pre­hen­sive plan to use exclu­sive­ly renew­able ener­gy and achieve uni­ver­sal access to reli­able elec­tric­i­ty. If suc­cess­ful, Dji­bouti would become the sev­enth coun­try in the world and the first African coun­try to achieve 100 per­cent renew­able energy.

Uncovering the News — 04/05/21 – 04/13/21

What’s At Stake: This world­wide silence about such a big accom­plish­ment for the small East African coun­try shows once again that for many news orga­ni­za­tions, Africa only makes the news in neg­a­tive instances.  

Dji­bouti, an East African nation is mak­ing it big with green ener­gy. On April 13, The Africa Report, an African news orga­ni­za­tion report­ed that Dji­bouti is aim­ing to become the first African coun­try to entire­ly rely on green energy. 

For a long time, the East African nation was known for its dif­fi­cul­ties in pro­vid­ing its pop­u­la­tion with elec­tric­i­ty. Over time, Dji­bouti was able to increase its share of renew­able ener­gy with­in its elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion. The coun­try has been on this tra­jec­to­ry since 2014. 

It appears the effort is near­ing a crescen­do, which is why it deserves our atten­tion. It’s an accom­plish­ment that should be applaud­ed.  How­ev­er, a google search of the coun­try shows no results men­tion­ing this announcement. 

Of the many news orga­ni­za­tions report­ing on Dji­bouti, most are African-led. Only a hand­ful, such as CNN, France 24 and Bloomberg, are non-African media. 

At first glance, the top news sto­ries on Dji­bouti are about the re-elec­tion of Pres­i­dent Ismail Omar Guelleh for the fifth time and the death of 42 migrants from a boat acci­dent off the Dji­bouti coast. 

The Africa Report is the only news orga­ni­za­tion to men­tion Djibouti’s work towards its goal to rely sole­ly on green energy. 

It was not easy to find this sto­ry in the first place. I only came it because it was pro­posed to me while read­ing anoth­er sto­ry about elec­tric­i­ty in Nige­ria. In try­ing to explore the sto­ry fur­ther I real­ized it was buried deep in the google search results about the coun­try “Dji­bouti.” The oth­er key­words that helped dig deep­er into the issue includ­ed “Dji­bouti green energy.”

News in French-speak­ing African coun­tries is often not report­ed by media out­lets in the Unit­ed States. How­ev­er, they are often wide­ly cov­ered in French media.  Because Dji­bouti is a also French-speak­ing coun­try, I tried search­es in French to find more infor­ma­tion on the country’s plan for green ener­gy. The search did not yield much.