Cameroon’s Minister for Water and Energy, Basile Atangana Kouna, officially launched the Phase II of the country’s Rural Electrification Project.

The project, which is a partnership between the Islamic Development Bank and the Republic of Cameroon, aims at improving the power distribution rate to 98% from the current 18%, and at a total cost of 600 billion CFA Francs.

An estimated 3,935 households in the Central, North and Northwest have been connected through this project.

In Cameroon, power production, transportation and sales were liberalized in 2001, with the privatization of the state-owned power utility SONEL under a 20-year concession, according to AFK Insider.

SONEL – renamed ENEO Cameroun S.A. in 2014 – monopolizes transmission and distribution, purchasing electricity from private producers through power purchase agreements with explicit governmental licenses and controls for private commercial producers.