Green Hydrogen Pilots: Which African Hub is Winning the Race?

• With $194 billion in proposed green hydrogen projects but only 17MW operational, which African hub offers bankable returns? Here is a data-driven contrast of Namibia, South Africa, and Kenya ahead of the Green Economy Summit Cape Town.

For the past three years, the competition to crown Africa’s green hydrogen champion has resembled a high-stakes bidding war conducted entirely in press releases. National strategies were unfurled with great ceremony. Megaprojects were announced in multiples of billions.

European energy ministers flew south to sign memoranda of understanding with such frequency that the documents began to resemble diplomatic souvenirs rather than binding financial commitments. Then the offtake gap arrived.

As delegates prepare to descend on the Century City Conference Centre for the Green Economy Summit Cape Town on February 24, the mood surrounding Africa’s most hyped clean energy sector has undergone a quiet but profound recalibration. The question likely to ricochet through the panel discussions and matchmaking sessions is no longer “Who has the biggest pipeline?” It is, instead, a far more unforgiving inquiry: “Who has actually built something that makes money?”

According to the Energy Industries Council’s (EIC) Africa Hydrogen Report, published in January 2026, the continent is host to 78 proposed green hydrogen projects, representing a staggering $194 billion in planned investment and 38 gigawatts of proposed electrolyser capacity. Yet only two are operational. Both are in Namibia. Their combined capacity is 17 megawatts, roughly the output of a single onshore wind turbine in the North Sea.

That gap between announcement and operation defines the current state of the industry. And it is why, two months into 2026, the race to become Africa’s premier green hydrogen hub has resolved into three distinct trajectories. Namibia is executing. South Africa is capitalizing. Kenya is incubating. Which model wins will depend less on natural endowment, all three countries possess world-class solar and wind resources, and more on the unglamorous grind of infrastructure finance, skills development, and bilateral deal execution.

The Namibian Gambit: Small-Scale Wins, Mega-Scale Ambition

If the green hydrogen transition were a marathon, Namibia would be the runner who has actually left the starting line while competitors are still adjusting their laces.

The country’s operational lead is slender but real. The Hydrogen Dune project, launched in late 2025 at Walvis Bay, is a joint venture between Namibia’s Ohlthaver & List and Belgium’s CMB.TECH, with substantial backing from the European Union and the German government. It is not large by global standards, a solar-powered, off-grid electrolyser feeding a refuelling station for hydrogen-powered vehicles and industrial applications. But it is producing.

German research minister Florian Seitz confirmed at the launch that German taxpayers have contributed nearly €50 million to the facility, with an additional €2 million approved days before the opening ceremony.

That phrase, “deliver results”, is not incidental. It is a quiet rebuke to the dozens of African hydrogen projects that, in the EIC’s assessment, remain “far from reaching final investment decision” due to a chronic lack of binding offtake agreements.

Yet even as Namibia celebrates its first-mover advantage, the financial community is laser-focused on what comes next. In January 2026, the African Development Bank approved a $10 million loan to Hyphen Hydrogen Energy, drawn from the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa. The headline figure is, in the context of Hyphen’s $10 billion overall price tag, numerically trivial. Strategically, it is anything but.

The AfDB’s money is earmarked for front-end engineering and design studies, the unglamorous, high-risk analytical work that must precede any credible final investment decision. It will fund detailed assessments of solar and wind generation, battery storage, electrolyser configuration, and, critically, desalination infrastructure in Namibia’s arid south. “SEFA’s intervention is catalytic,” said Daniel Schroth, the AfDB’s director for renewable energy and energy efficiency. “By supporting these essential pre-investment activities, we are unlocking billions in project financing”.

Hyphen’s first phase alone envisions 3.75 gigawatts of renewable generation and 1.5 gigawatts of electrolysis. The project’s total planned renewable capacity of 7.5 gigawatts is more than ten times Namibia’s current national grid. This is not an energy project; it is an economic re-foundation. If it reaches financial close, it will produce two million tonnes of green ammonia annually, create 15,000 construction jobs and 3,000 permanent positions, 90 per cent reserved for Namibian nationals, 20 per cent targeted at youth, and supply three million litres per day of desalinated water to the Lüderitz region.

But “if” remains the operative word. The EIC report, published the same week as the AfDB’s loan approval, delivered a sobering verdict on Africa’s export-oriented hydrogen strategy: “Offtake agreements are a critical factor in transitioning projects from pre-FID to construction. Without revenue certainty, even well-located projects face delays, to say the least”.

Namibia has solved the early-stage feasibility problem. It has not yet solved the offtake problem. The race, in other words, is far from over.

Developed by Hive Hydrogen South Africa, a joint venture between the UK’s Hive Energy and South Africa’s BuiltAfrica Group, chaired by former Eskom CEO Thulani Gcabashe, the Coega Green Ammonia project has avoided the speculative, land-backed announcement cycle that has characterized hydrogen development elsewhere on the continent. Instead, it has methodically accumulated permits. (Source/Hive Energy)

South Africa’s Industrial Counter-Argument

If Namibia is placing its bets on greenfield export megaprojects, South Africa is advancing a very different thesis: that the future of African green hydrogen lies not in remote coastal deserts but inside existing special economic zones, connected to deepwater ports and, crucially, to balance sheets that have already weathered the pre-development risk.

The Coega Green Ammonia project in Nelson Mandela Bay is the clearest expression of this approach. Developed by Hive Hydrogen South Africa, a joint venture between the UK’s Hive Energy and South Africa’s BuiltAfrica Group, chaired by former Eskom CEO Thulani Gcabashe, the project has avoided the speculative, land-backed announcement cycle that has characterized hydrogen development elsewhere on the continent. Instead, it has methodically accumulated permits.

In June 2025, Hive Hydrogen announced the completion of its 1,430 megawatt Solar PV Cluster development phase in the Northern Cape, having secured all environmental impact assessment records of decision, permits, authorizations, and consents. The solar cluster will supply 40 per cent of the Coega plant’s power requirements, drawing on one of the highest average annual solar irradiation zones on the planet. Two wind clusters totaling 1,880 megawatts will provide the balance.

The plant itself is designed to produce more than one million metric tonnes of green ammonia annually, supported by up to 1,120 megawatts of electrolyser capacity, four 35,000-tonne ammonia storage tanks, and a 7-kilometer cryogenic pipeline connecting directly to the Port of Ngqura’s deepwater export berth.

Crucially, that infrastructure largely already exists. “The Project site is fit-for-purpose and does not need the development and construction of new significant infrastructure,” the company stated, a quiet but devastating competitive advantage in a sector where Namibian developers are still pricing out tens of billions for greenfield transmission lines and port upgrades.

The financing structure is equally distinctive. In late 2025, the SA-H2 Fund, managed by Climate Fund Managers and Dutch development financier Invest International, committed up to $20 million in development funding to complete the final pre-construction phase, securing rights to participate in up to $200 million in construction financing. Financial close is targeted for the second half of 2026, with commercial operations expected in 2029.

The contrast with Namibia is instructive. Windhoek’s flagship project is backed by sovereign-guaranteed concession agreements and concessional development finance. South Africa’s is backed by a partnership between a former Eskom chairman and a Dutch development bank, sited inside an operational special economic zone, exporting through an existing port. One is a national industrial policy experiment. The other is a structured equity transaction.

“South Africa’s hydrogen push is more capital-markets native,” one Johannesburg-based project finance lawyer put it during a recent industry roundtable. “The Namibian model assumes that if you build it, they will come. The South African model assumes you don’t build it until you know who ‘they’ are and what they’ll pay.”

The EIC’s prescription for the continent aligns squarely with the Coega approach. The report’s authors argued that Africa’s hydrogen push “has leaned too heavily on multi-gigawatt projects that lack secured offtake and vital infrastructure,” recommending instead that “smaller, phased projects that can move more quickly toward execution should be prioritised”.

South Africa, in other words, is not trying to win the size race. It is trying to win the execution race.

Funded under the European Union’s Opportunity-Driven Skills and VET in Africa initiative, Kenya’s VET4HYDROGEN project targets the green hydrogen value chain by engaging private sector actors to align technical and vocational training with emerging employment opportunities. It is not building electrolysers. It is building the workforce that will eventually operate them.

Kenya’s Long Game: Research, Skills, and the Greenfield Challenge

And then there is Kenya. On any objective assessment of renewable resources, the country should be a leading contender. Its geothermal capacity is world-class. Its wind regimes in the Rift Valley and Turkana corridor are well understood. Its proximity to Middle Eastern and Asian export markets is competitive with Southern African peers.

Yet Kenya is conspicuously absent from the EIC’s list of the continent’s top three proposed hydrogen spenders, Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa account for roughly 80 per cent of Africa’s planned hydrogen capital investment, with Egypt alone representing $88.5 billion. Not one Kenyan project appears among the 78 tracked by EICDataStream.

This is not because Kenya lacks ambition. It is because Kenya is pursuing a fundamentally different strategy, one oriented not toward immediate export-scale electrolysis, but toward the patient construction of a domestic hydrogen ecosystem anchored in human capital and applied research.

The VET4HYDROGEN project, implemented from September 2025 through August 2027, exemplifies this approach. Funded under the European Union’s Opportunity-Driven Skills and VET in Africa initiative, the project targets the green hydrogen value chain by engaging private sector actors to align technical and vocational training with emerging employment opportunities. It is not building electrolysers. It is building the workforce that will eventually operate them.

Deep in Kenya’s Rift Valley, Moi University’s Dynamic Renewable Energy Innovation Park and Green Hydrogen, Ammonia and Fertilizer Research Hub is actively seeking climate finance and development partnerships to scale what is, in effect, a university-anchored industrial incubation platform.

The hub’s priority financing windows include renewable energy infrastructure scaling (targeting over 120 megawatts of solar capacity), green hydrogen systems development, green ammonia production for climate-smart agriculture, and, significantly, applied research, pilot plants, and technology showcase.

This is not pre-commercial. It is pre-pre-commercial. And that is precisely the point. Kenya appears to have concluded that the export-oriented, gigawatt-scale hydrogen model is, for now, a rich country’s game.

The EIC’s finding that no electrolyser manufacturers currently operate in Africa, leaving early projects “heavily dependent on imported equipment,” reinforces the structural disadvantage facing African developers in a supply chain dominated by Chinese and European original equipment manufacturers. Egypt has attempted to mitigate this through a 20 per cent local content requirement tied to incentives. Kenya lacks the domestic industrial base to impose similar conditions, so it is trying to build one from first principles.

“The project is structured to leverage co-financing, strengthen public–private collaboration, and ensure financial, institutional, and environmental sustainability,” Moi University’s call for partnership states. It is, in essence, a long options trade on African industrialization, a wager that the countries which control the skills pipelines and research infrastructure will ultimately capture the manufacturing value chain, not just the resource extraction rents.

Whether this wager pays off depends on time horizons that most infrastructure investors do not possess. The Green Economy Summit Cape Town, with its 150 attending investors and $5 billion in estimated pipeline opportunities, is oriented toward projects that can absorb capital in the next 24 to 36 months . Kenya is playing a 10-year game.

The Benchmark: Morocco’s Land-Backed Certainty

No assessment of African green hydrogen competitiveness is complete without acknowledging the elephant in the room, or, more precisely, the kingdom at the continent’s northwestern edge.

Morocco is not, strictly speaking, competing in the same race as South Africa, Namibia and Kenya. It is running a different race entirely. And it is winning.

In February 2026, the Moroccan government signed preliminary land reservation agreements with five investor consortia selected under the country’s “Morocco Offer” for green hydrogen. The agreements cover the mobilization of public land in the country’s southern regions, with each project potentially accessing up to 30,000 hectares. Total planned investment is approximately $35 billion.

The contrast with sub-Saharan Africa could not be starker. While Namibian developers negotiate 40-year concession agreements and South African developers assemble private land portfolios, the Moroccan state has simply identified nearly one million hectares for hydrogen development, made an initial tranche of 300,000 hectares available, and allocated it to specific investors under a standardized contractual framework.

This is not a market-based approach. It is a statist industrial mobilization, and it is working. Morocco’s selected consortia include Ortus, Acciona, Nordex, Taqa, Cepsa, and domestic giant Nareva. The projects are integrated by design: renewable generation, electrolysis, and green ammonia processing will be co-located on allocated land, eliminating the grid connection and land assembly risks that plague sub-Saharan developments.

“Governments need to stick to the basics investors need,” Rebecca Groundwater, EIC’s global head of external affairs, told the Africa Hydrogen Report. “Set clear rules, keep policy stable, speed up permits, and get the basics in place on grid and water”.

Morocco has done exactly that. Its land allocation mechanism, combined with existing grid infrastructure and proximity to European offtakers via the Spain-Morocco interconnector, has produced a project pipeline that is, by sub-Saharan standards, almost preternaturally de-risked.

For South Africa and Namibia, the Moroccan model is simultaneously instructive and unreachable. It presupposes a level of state capacity and fiscal space that neither country currently possesses. But it also establishes the performance benchmark against which their own efforts will be measured.

When European utilities and Asian trading houses decide which hemisphere to source their certified green ammonia from, they will compare Namibian f.o.b. pricing against Moroccan f.o.b. pricing. The difference will reflect not only resource quality, but the efficiency of the regulatory and land administration systems that sit atop those resources.

The Cape Town Verdict

Which brings us back to Cape Town. The Green Economy Summit, now in its fourth edition, has positioned itself as the primary clearinghouse for bankable green projects on the continent. Its organizers, VUKA Group, have vetted nearly 30 investment-ready initiatives from more than 100 applicants across eight high-growth sectors, including green hydrogen.

The selection criteria are unforgiving: projects must be scalable, de-risked, and capable of delivering both strong financial returns and measurable environmental outcomes. “The overwhelming response and exceptional quality of applications reaffirms Africa’s immense potential in the green economy,” said Elodie Delagneau, the summit’s investment project lead.

But potential is not performance. And the EIC’s diagnosis, that “many of these projects are still stifled by a lack of offtake agreements”, remains the central unresolved tension in the African hydrogen narrative.

So who is winning? If the metric is operational capacity, Namibia is winning. Two projects, 17 megawatts, actual molecules.

If the metric is financial structuring and export readiness, South Africa is winning. Coega’s integration into the Port of Ngqura, its anchored development financing, and its methodical permitting process represent the most credible path to a 2029 final investment decision on the continent outside North Africa.

If the metric is long-term industrial capability, Kenya is winning. Its investments in technical education and applied research will not produce green ammonia exports this decade. They may, however, produce the technicians and engineers who build Africa’s first domestically manufactured electrolyser components in the 2030s.

And if the metric is state capacity to mobilize land and capital at scale, Morocco is winning, and it is not particularly close.

The EIC’s prescription is unambiguous: “Smaller, phased projects that can move more quickly toward execution should be prioritised”. By that standard, Namibia’s Hydrogen Dune and South Africa’s Coega are on the right track, even if Hyphen’s $10 billion behemoth remains a high-wire act without parallel on the continent.

The Green Economy Summit Cape Town will, over four days in late February, provide the clearest available snapshot of where the race stands. More than 150 investors will examine the numbers behind the narratives. Development finance institutions will calibrate their catalytic interventions. Project developers will hunt for the offtake agreements that have proven so elusive.

And somewhere in the matchmaking sessions, a Kenyan researcher from Moi University may well find themselves in conversation with a South African project financier or a Namibian concession negotiator. That conversation, between the long game and the near term, between industrial policy and structured finance, is, in microcosm, the story of African green hydrogen itself.

No single hub has won the race. But the race is no longer theoretical. The pilots are producing. The engineering designs are funded. The port infrastructure is being measured and priced.

For the first time since the hydrogen hype cycle began, the question is not whether Africa can produce green molecules. The question is which African hub can produce them at a price the world is willing to pay.

The answer, Cape Town will soon discover, is being written not in press releases, but in offtake agreements. And those, unlike memoranda of understanding, are binding.

Read also: Africa’s Green Economy Summit 2026 readies pipeline of investment-ready green ventures

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