Can Renewable Energy Deliver African Quests For Sustainable Development?

The quest to continuously attain economic development without surpassing the cycle of global warming limit of 1.5°C has necessitated the need to explore more sustainable ways of living on the human planet. This has equally placed the sustainable development agenda high on the priority list of many international, regional and national governments. Sustainable development (SD) has been viewed as a pattern of development that avails an economy the basic economic, social and environmental needs without endangering the natural, built and social systems. Therefore, the calls to resolve the developmental and environmental conflicts have received global attention. In this paper, the authors examine the nexus between renewable energy and sustainable development in Africa over the period, 1990-2015. The number of countries considered are 51 African countries. The coverage period is constrained by data availability. All the data employed were sourced from the World Development Indicators, 2017 except the data on human development index (HDI) which was sourced from the HDI report of the United Nations Development Program, 2018. Analysis are predicated on fixed effects panel model based on the Hausman test and the system generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM). The SYS-GMM is considered in order to control for shortcomings associated with OLS estimation technique which include among others, endogeneity, simultaneity bias, and measurement error. Prior to these approaches, the panel cross-section dependence test was used to test if a shock in a country in the panel can have effect on other countries in the panel. The analysis shows that renewable energy positively impacts on both the economic dimension and aggregate SD index. It also reduces carbon (iv) oxide emission thereby promoting environmental quality. However, it impedes the HDI which represents the social dimensions of SD. The impact of renewable energy on environmental quality or environmental dimension of SD is further corroborated through the conduit of hydro and natural gas sources. Regarding other control variables, nonrenewable energy negates SD but financial deepening, gross fixed capital and population serve as propellants while FDI exerts univariate impact. The findings support a shift from a monolithic fossil-fuel economy to one driven by a growing share of renewable in the energy mix.