Kenya Is Building an EV Charging Network, The Next Challenge Is Where

Last Updated 2 hours ago by Kenya Engineer

Kenya is emerging as one of Africa’s leading electric-mobility markets, but the country’s next challenge may have little to do with the number of electric vehicles on the road. It is where those vehicles will be able to charge.

A new assessment by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa places Kenya second in Africa for electric-vehicle charging stations, with 235 stations recorded in 2025. Egypt led with 300, while Ethiopia and Rwanda followed with 100 and 40 respectively. More than 25 African countries had no charging station at all during the period covered by the assessment.

The figures put Kenya among the continent’s early leaders, but they also expose a problem that is becoming harder to ignore. Most of the country’s charging infrastructure remains concentrated around Nairobi and its satellite towns.

For an electric vehicle owner travelling regularly between Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret, Nakuru or smaller towns, the question is not whether Kenya has hundreds of charging points. It is whether there is a suitable charger on the route, whether it is compatible with the vehicle, whether it is available when needed and whether the local electricity network can support it.

That is a much more complicated infrastructure question.

Charging is becoming an electricity-system issue

An EV charger may look like little more than a piece of roadside equipment, but every charging point is ultimately connected to the electricity network.

A small AC charger at a home may place a modest additional load on a building. A commercial charging site serving several cars can require considerably more capacity. The requirements become more substantial when the vehicles are electric buses, trucks or fleets that need to recharge within a narrow window before returning to service.

This is where the transition from petrol and diesel to electricity becomes an infrastructure story.

A petrol station can store large quantities of energy in tanks and deliver fuel relatively quickly. An electric charging station depends on the grid, a connection with adequate capacity, electrical protection, chargers, communications systems and, increasingly, software that manages when and how vehicles charge.

The charger is therefore only one part of the system.

Kenya Power’s own expansion plans illustrate this. In 2025, the utility announced plans to install 45 EV chargers across locations including Nairobi, Nyeri, Kisumu, Eldoret, Nakuru, Mombasa and Taita Taveta, alongside efforts to strengthen the electricity infrastructure needed to support e-mobility.

The geographical spread matters because it begins to turn electric mobility from an urban experiment into a transport network.

Nairobi cannot be the whole charging network

The concentration of chargers around Nairobi is understandable. The capital has the country’s largest concentration of vehicles, businesses, commercial fleets and early EV adopters. It is also where many companies developing electric mobility technologies have established their operations.

But a charging network designed mainly around Nairobi has an obvious limitation: it does not automatically create electric mobility across the country.

A driver should eventually be able to plan an electric journey in much the same way a petrol or diesel driver plans a long-distance trip today. That means knowing where to charge, how long charging will take and whether another compatible charger is available if the first one is occupied or out of service.

The challenge becomes even more important for commercial vehicles.

A private car can often wait an extra hour to charge. A bus cannot necessarily do so if it has passengers waiting for it. A delivery motorcycle cannot simply remain at a charging point when its working day depends on keeping the vehicle moving.

This is why the future charging network will probably not consist entirely of public chargers in shopping centres and petrol stations.

The fleet may come before the private car

One of the most interesting aspects of Kenya’s electric-mobility market is the importance of commercial fleets.

Electric buses, motorcycles and delivery vehicles operate on predictable routes. Their owners know approximately how far the vehicles travel each day, when they return to a depot and how much energy they need.

That makes fleet charging easier to plan than trying to predict exactly when thousands of private motorists will want to charge.

In an earlier Kenya Engineer interview, Africa E-Mobility Alliance co-founder and managing director Warren Ondanje argued that Kenya’s large motorcycle and bus markets provide a particularly strong commercial case for electrification. He also pointed to battery-as-a-service, portable battery swapping and fleet-oriented models as ways of reducing the upfront cost of electric mobility.

Read the full Kenya Engineer interview with Warren Ondanje

Ondanje also identified charging as one of the major bottlenecks for Africa’s e-mobility sector, pointing to models such as battery swapping for motorcycles, solar-powered charging hubs, mini-grid charging in rural areas and dedicated fleet depots. These approaches recognise an important reality: there may not be one charging model that works everywhere.

The grid has to be ready too

A common assumption is that once a charger is installed, the electricity supply problem has been solved.

It has not.

A charging hub may require a new transformer, a larger connection, upgraded cables or changes to the local distribution network. If several high-power chargers are connected to the same part of the grid, the additional demand can become significant even if the national electricity system has plenty of generation capacity.

This distinction between national capacity and local capacity is important.

A country may have sufficient generation overall while a particular neighbourhood transformer or distribution feeder is unable to support a new high-demand charging site without reinforcement.

That is why EV infrastructure planning increasingly needs to be coordinated with electricity-network planning.

Kenya Power has already introduced a dedicated e-mobility electricity tariff. Data released by the utility shows that electricity consumption under the e-mobility customer category reached 8.43 GWh in 2025, a 188 per cent increase from 2024. By February 2026, 205 customers had joined the dedicated tariff, which differentiates between peak and off-peak charging prices.

The significance goes beyond the price paid by an EV owner. Time-of-use pricing can encourage charging when the network has more available capacity rather than concentrating demand during already busy periods.

As electric fleets grow, this could become increasingly important.

The charger does not have to be fast

There is also a tendency to treat charging speed as the most important measure of a charging station.

It is not always.

A vehicle that spends several hours at a depot overnight may not need an extremely powerful charger. A bus returning to service in 45 minutes may have very different requirements. A long-distance driver stopping briefly on a highway needs yet another type of charging experience.

The appropriate charger therefore depends on how the vehicle is used.

This has implications for the cost of infrastructure. Installing the fastest possible charger everywhere would require more electrical capacity and could increase the cost of both the charging equipment and the grid connection.

A well-designed charging network instead matches charging power to the needs of the vehicle, the location and the available electricity infrastructure.

What happens when the grid is not strong enough?

This is where alternatives such as battery storage, solar generation and battery swapping become more interesting.

A charging station does not necessarily have to draw all of its instantaneous power directly from the grid. Batteries can be charged at a slower rate and then discharge rapidly when vehicles arrive, reducing the peak demand imposed on the grid.

Solar generation can provide additional energy during daylight hours, although its output varies with weather and time of day. A combination of solar, battery storage and grid electricity can therefore be designed around the charging pattern of a particular site.

Battery swapping takes the idea further for certain types of vehicles, particularly electric motorcycles. Instead of waiting for a battery to charge, a rider exchanges a depleted battery for a charged one.

The depleted battery can then be charged when electricity is available.

For a country where commercial motorcycles are a major part of urban transport, this model could prove particularly relevant.

The charging network is also a data network

Modern charging infrastructure is not simply electrical hardware.

Chargers can communicate with software platforms that record energy consumption, charging sessions, vehicle identification, payments, faults and equipment status. Operators can use this information to understand demand and determine where additional infrastructure is required.

This data could become increasingly valuable as Kenya’s EV fleet expands.

A charger that is rarely used tells an operator something different from one that consistently has vehicles waiting. A depot that repeatedly reaches its electrical limit may need additional grid capacity or storage. A highway location with heavy demand could justify another charging point nearby.

The charging network will therefore generate information that can influence future infrastructure investment.

The numbers need some caution

There is also a reason to be careful when comparing Kenya’s charging-station numbers.

Different organisations have reported different figures for the size of Kenya’s EV ecosystem. Earlier Kenya Engineer research found that official public statements had cited different totals for registered EVs, depending on the date, vehicle definitions and database used.

The same caution applies to charging infrastructure.

A count of charging stations does not tell us how many individual charging points exist, their power ratings, how many vehicles they serve, whether they are publicly accessible or dedicated to fleets, how reliable they are, or where they are located.

For infrastructure planning, those details matter considerably more than a simple national total.

Kenya would benefit from a regularly updated public charging database showing location, charger type, power rating, connector standard, operating status and accessibility. Such information would make it easier for motorists to plan journeys and for planners and investors to identify gaps in the network.

From charging stations to charging corridors

The next phase of Kenya’s electric-mobility story is therefore likely to be less about putting individual chargers on the map and more about connecting them into a functional network.

Highway corridors will need strategically placed charging facilities. Urban areas will need a mixture of public, residential and commercial charging. Bus operators will need depot infrastructure. Motorcycle operators may need battery-swapping networks. Industrial and logistics centres may require high-power charging for commercial vehicles.

And all of this will have to connect to an electricity system that is already serving homes, businesses, industry, data centres, irrigation and other growing loads.

That makes the expansion of EV charging part of a much larger infrastructure question.

Kenya’s relatively renewable electricity mix gives electric mobility an important advantage. But the environmental and economic benefits of EVs will ultimately depend on whether the country can build a charging system that is reliable, affordable and geographically useful.

The 235 charging stations recorded in 2025 show that Kenya has already moved beyond the starting line.

The harder question now is whether the next hundreds of chargers will be placed where the country needs them most.