Zambia is set to resume construction on the Zambia-Tanzania Interconnector Project, linking its power grid to East Africa.
The development aims to create one of the largest energy markets in the world, as reported by Reuters.
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Achim Fock, World Bank country manager for Zambia, announced the project’s restart during a signing ceremony on 11 April 2025.
The $320m project, financed by the World Bank, the European Union and Britain, is expected to be completed by 2028.
The remaining work costs $298m, with a World Bank grant covering $245m, as stated by Acting Finance Minister Chipoka Mulenga at the event.
Initially proposed more than a decade before the signing, the project has faced delays including the Covid-19 pandemic and Zambia’s debt default in late 2020.
The project involves constructing a 620km, 400kV double circuit transmission line from Iringa in Tanzania to the Zambian border, extending to Sumbawanga.
The initiative will link the Tanzanian grid with Zambia’s grid, featuring a substation at Tunduma near the Zambian border.
The project aims to increase access to reliable electricity in southwestern Tanzania, replace a 5MW diesel-fired mini-grid near Sumbawanga, and reduce reliance on imports from Zambia.
Additional benefits are reducing line losses from Iringa to Mbeya, improving power supply reliability from future plants in southern Tanzania and creating a transmission corridor linking Ethiopia-Kenya-Tanzania to Southern Africa through Zambia.
Zambia’s recent agreement with bondholders is seen as a test case for debt rework under the Common Framework, a G20 platform involving major creditors such as China and the Paris Club.
Achim Fock noted that an integrated market connecting Southern and East African power pools would lower electricity costs, enhance energy security, and foster trade and investment opportunities in Africa’s power sector.
