Reliable power may be the highest-return investment The Gambia has yet to make. Fifty years of blackouts have cost the country not just evenings in the dark but the factories, businesses and industries that never came into being.
Nearly fifty years of the same darkness. The first time I remember the lights failing on Tobaski was around 1978, the year I finished my O-levels. Somewhere in the festivities the power went, as it had a way of doing, and we thought little of it. Nearly half a century later, this June, it happened again: the same festival, the same darkness, only a different generation sitting in it.
The problem is old, and it has outlasted every fix. Gambians have heard the promises before. After the Occupy Westfield protests in 2017, blackouts were to be history by the end of 2018. In 2024, ninety per cent of the country's power problems were to be solved by June 2026. June arrived with some of the worst outages in years, parts of the Kombos without electricity for up to twenty hours a day. A protest followed, then an emergency fifty-day deal to import power from Senegal, then the return of the blackouts in August when the fifty days ran out. The utility has changed its name three times since 1972. Tens of billions of dalasi have gone into it. The lights still go out. The question worth asking is not why the power fails. It is what the failure has cost.
The blackout is an evening. The lost economy is a lifetime. Ask a Gambian what a blackout costs and they will tell you about the spoiled food, the sleepless night, the shop that closed early. Those costs are real. But they are the small ones. The large cost is invisible because it is the cost of things that never happened: the business never started, the factory never built, the job never created. Fifty years of unreliable power have not just slowed The Gambia's economy. They have shaped it, bending it away from the industries that need reliable electricity and toward the ones that can survive without it. Over fifty years, unreliable power has selected the kind of economy The Gambia was allowed to become. Five examples show what that has meant.
The Gambia catches fish it cannot freeze. The waters off The Gambia are among the richest fishing grounds on the West African coast. A country with that resource should have a fish processing industry: cold storage at every landing site, freezing plants, packaging lines, exports of frozen and processed fish to Europe and the region. Instead, most of the catch is sold fresh at whatever price the day allows, exported with minimal processing, or handled by foreign vessels and foreign-owned plants that bring their own power. Cold storage needs electricity twenty-four hours a day, every day. Without it, the fish that could have built an industry are sold at the beach for what they fetch.
The Gambia grows nuts it cannot process. Groundnuts have been The Gambia's export crop for a century. Cashews are a newer one. Both leave the country almost entirely unprocessed. The groundnuts go out in shell. The cashews go out raw, to be shelled, roasted and packaged in India or Vietnam and sold back to the world at many times the price. Processing needs reliable power: for shelling, roasting, oil pressing, packaging. The Gambia has the crop. Other countries have the factories. The value goes with the factories.
Gambian hotels run on Gambian generators. Tourism is the country's largest source of foreign exchange. Every hotel above a certain size runs its own generator because the grid cannot be relied on. The generator costs money to buy, fuel and maintain, and that cost is passed on in room rates. The large foreign-owned resorts can absorb it. The small Gambian-owned guesthouse or lodge often cannot. So the industry consolidates around the operators who can afford their own power, and the Gambian entrepreneur is priced out of the Gambian tourism sector. The country hosts the tourists, but much of the higher-value ownership sits elsewhere.
The call centres are in Dakar. Senegal has built the kind of business services sector The Gambia might plausibly have developed: call centres, data processing, software firms serving French-speaking markets in Europe and Africa. The Gambia is English-speaking, with a large diaspora in Britain and America and a young population comfortable with technology. It could have a similar sector serving English-speaking markets. It has almost none. Business services need power every hour of every day. A call centre that goes dark at three in the afternoon loses the client. That kind of work goes where the lights stay on.
Every trade loses hours every day. The tailor with an electric machine. The welder. The printer. The hairdresser. The carpenter with power tools. The cold drinks seller. The barber. The photographer. The pharmacist with a refrigerator. Each of them loses hours of work every day the power fails, and none of them can afford a generator big enough to matter. Multiply that across every trade in every town, every day, for fifty years, and the sum is an economy that has been working at a fraction of its capacity for two generations.
The numbers confirm what the examples show. Ask Gambian businesses to name their biggest problem and only about six in a hundred say electricity. That sounds small. But small firms have adapted to operating small, and many have stopped counting the cost. Among the largest businesses, those with a hundred workers or more, forty-three in a hundred put electricity first, ahead of finance and transport combined. Electricity does not always rank first for small firms. Among large firms it becomes decisive. A recent survey found just nine large businesses in a sample of 162. Barely four in a hundred Gambian businesses spend anything on developing new products, against more than twenty in a hundred across similar African countries. The missing factories are not missing by accident.
The businesses that can cope have quietly stopped demanding change. Why does so little change? Because those who can afford it have solved the problem for themselves. They buy generators, pay the cost, and stop depending on the grid. Nearly nine in ten businesses suffer outages, and the strongest simply leave the public supply altogether. Each one makes sense for the business and does damage to the country. The large, visible businesses that might otherwise demand reform have gone their own way, and the pressure to fix the system disappears with them. The people best able to demand change have the least reason to. That, more than incompetence alone, is why fifty years have changed so little.
Demand has nearly tripled. Supply has not kept up. The situation is getting worse. Electricity demand in The Gambia has nearly tripled in ten years, from about 300,000 megawatt hours in 2016 to an expected 970,000 in 2026, growing at around 12 per cent a year. A system that cannot meet today's demand while demand grows that fast is falling further behind every year. What looks like a stable problem is a slow collapse.
The fix is unglamorous. It is also one of the best investments The Gambia could make. Fixing the power supply is not a technical chore. It is likely among the highest-return public investments the country could make. The remedy means enough reliable domestic capacity, solar with proper storage and thermal plants that are actually maintained, to keep hospitals, water and businesses running through a regional outage. It means treating imported power as a way to buy cheaply, not as the backbone of national supply. It means maintaining what exists before it fails. And it means fixing the finances of the utility: collecting what is owed, paying suppliers before arrears become outages, and investing on schedule rather than in emergency. None of this produces a ribbon to cut. All of it would bring back the fish plant, the cashew factory, the guesthouse and the call centre that the darkness has kept away.
And so the pattern holds: another generation sits in the dark. Until then it continues: a new name, a new financier, a new opening ceremony, and sooner or later another festival spent in the dark. I watched those lights fail as a school-leaver. A child born into this year's darkness could, on present form, watch them fail again with children of their own. The blackout is an evening's inconvenience. The economy that could have been is the tragedy.
Ebrima A. Faal is a Gambian development economist. He served as a senior executive at the African Development Bank and as a senior economist and resident representative at the International Monetary Fund. He is CEO of Development Perspectives UK.
