According to USAID Power Africa’s 2014 annual report, “there are 1.2 billion people on earth who live this reality, and half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. Throughout the region, access rates average approximately 30%. Among the 20 countries with the highest deficits in access to electricity, twelve are in sub-Saharan Africa”. Further, the African Development Bank’s President stated this week  that “Over 645 million Africans do not have access to electricity - and 700 million go without access to clean cooking energy, with 600,000 dying each year from indoor pollution from reliance on biomass for cooking. A continent that accounts for 16% of the world's population has 53% of all the total population without electricity in the world.”...Africa is blessed with enough solar, hydro power potential...to address these challenges...African leaders who will be attending the event will have an excellent opportunity to engage with public and private investors including representatives from the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), African Development Bank (AfDB), and the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB)...the undersigned African civil society organizations hereby express their concerns about the choice of technology for “powering Africa” and challenge the participants at the Summit, especially African Ministers, the US government, the World Bank, USAID, IFC, AfDB, and BRICS NDB, to ensure that discussions around this meeting take into account, poor and marginalized people’s access to clean energy, and critical issues of climate change and human rights, including the rights of indigenous peoples...Call upon African governments to improve environmental and social assessment policies to effectively address impacts of projects on local communities...Ensure involvement and participation of civil society and local communities in decisions around the development of energy projects and include them in the funding process through consultations.