The Open Charge Alliance (OCA), which publishes whitepapers on the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP), announced on Nov. 9, 2026 that it will hold a webinar on Nov. 17 called "Building Africa's EV Charging Future and How OCPP Can Help." The session starts at 1:00 PM CET, which is 3:00 PM East Africa Time. The programme is based on a whitepaper the alliance published in September, "Open and Interoperable Electric Vehicle Charging in Emerging Markets."

The news is modest: one event announcement and one document. Still, it shows where the alliance is spending attention. Over the past year OCA has published several papers on payments and on charging in specific regions. This explainer covers what was announced, what the whitepaper's listing says it addresses, and what remains unknown.

What exactly was announced?

The Nov. 9 post on OCA's site lists the date, the time and seven speakers:

  • Sacha Scheffer, UNEP
  • Lonneke Driessen and Alex van Rijswijck, OCA
  • Kofi Ampomah-Benefo, AFSEC
  • Merlin Tonka, Clemios
  • Mamadou Ndiaye, CETUD
  • John Msingo, GoKabisa

According to OCA, the speakers will discuss the development of EV charging in emerging markets, the role of OCPP and open standards, continental e-mobility standards, and regional use cases from Cameroon, Senegal, Rwanda and Kenya. The post also lists practical challenges related to interoperability, connectivity, backend communication and payments. It says the webinar will end with a discussion and Q&A. The post does not say which use case belongs to which speaker's organization, so this article doesn't assign them.

What is the whitepaper behind it?

OCA's whitepaper archive lists "Open and Interoperable Electric Vehicle Charging in Emerging Markets" as version 1.0, dated Sept. 16, 2026. The archive summary says the paper examines how OCPP supports EV charging deployment in emerging markets, addressing intermittent connectivity, power outages and mobile (the archive text is cut off at that word, so the rest of the list is not visible in the source reviewed).

Those conditions touch the link between a charging station and the backend system that manages it, which is the connection OCPP is designed for. If the data connection drops or the grid goes down partway through a session, the charger and the backend still have to agree on what happened. That is general background, not a description of the paper's recommendations.

The archive listing gives only that short scope. The sources reviewed for this article contain no independent coverage or third-party analysis of the whitepaper's specific recommendations, so this article doesn't describe its technical contents beyond what OCA states.

How does it fit with OCA's other recent papers?

The emerging-markets paper appears alongside several documents on payments and regional conditions. OCA's archive lists the following, with dates as published:

  • Nov. 13, 2025: OCPP & M-PESA mobile payments
  • Nov. 4, 2025: OCPP & UPI mobile payments
  • June 1, 2026: OCPP & QR code payment in Japan, v1.0, which the archive says concerns OCPP 2.1
  • Sept. 16, 2026: Open and Interoperable Electric Vehicle Charging in Emerging Markets, v1.0

The archive's 2026 list also includes papers outside that payments theme: a Security Operations Guide v2.0 (Sept. 22), the fourth edition of the OCPP 1.6 Security Whitepaper (Feb. 5) and v1.1 of Using OCPP with CHAdeMO (June 1). The 2025 list adds Migrating Charging Stations (Nov. 18) and OCPP 2.Lite v2 (July 17).

For Africa, the M-PESA paper is the most directly relevant of these. OCA describes M-PESA as widely used in Kenya and other African countries. The paper looks at both simple and advanced models of integrating it into EV charging payments. It also points to OCPP features that support such scenarios, including remote transaction control and prepaid transaction limits. OCA presents the mobile-first approach as a way to make public charging more accessible without cards, proprietary apps or RFID tokens.

Why interoperability keeps coming up in Africa

The webinar lands in a broader discussion about whether Africa's early charging networks will connect to each other or develop as separate, closed systems.

On Nov. 11, 2025, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office's Global Research and Technology Development unit published a page on a report from the Powering Renewable Energy Opportunity (PREO) programme, which is co-funded by the UK Government and the IKEA Foundation. The report, "Driving Interoperability: Insights from PREO's E-Mobility Portfolio," was launched at Africa E-Mobility Week 2025. It draws on five years of investment evidence and includes case studies from five companies. According to the page, the report identifies limitations of vertically integrated business models that lead to duplicated infrastructure, fragmented supply chains and underutilised assets, and it advocates shared systems that can reduce capital requirements and improve asset utilisation. The report predates OCA's whitepaper by about ten months and is useful as background only.

A January 2026 guest article on NextBillion by Nyaga Kebuchi and Ashay Abbhi made a related case. The authors describe African e-mobility as an emerging but highly fragmented market with uneven policies. They argue that without interoperability, drivers and fleets face vendor lock-in and disjointed payment journeys, and they compare the EU's regulatory approach with India's push on battery swapping. It is an opinion piece, and it is cited here for that perspective, not as reporting on OCA's work.

Neither source discusses the new whitepaper or the webinar. Together they show that interoperability had been raised as an issue in African e-mobility before OCA published its paper.

What It Means for Drivers

Nothing in the announcement changes how any charger works on Nov. 17. It covers a webinar and a whitepaper. Neither is a regulation, a funding award or a network deployment, and none of the sources names a new site that is opening or a payment option going live.

Drivers and fleet operators in African markets should know about the topics in play:

  • Paying by phone. OCA's M-PESA paper (Nov. 13, 2025) explores how M-PESA could be integrated into EV charging payments without cards, proprietary apps or RFID tokens. Whether a given network offers that is up to the operator. The sources don't identify any network that has adopted the paper's models.
  • Charging when the network or grid is unreliable. The September whitepaper's archive summary says it addresses intermittent connectivity and power outages. How a particular charger behaves during an outage depends on its hardware, its software and the operator's setup, not on the whitepaper itself.
  • Roaming between networks. The webinar agenda includes interoperability and continental e-mobility standards. The sources describe these as discussion topics, not as agreements that have been adopted.

No prices or per-kWh rates appear in any of the sources, and this article quotes none. Anyone installing or upgrading charging equipment at a home, depot or business site should use a licensed electrician and follow the manufacturer's instructions. A protocol whitepaper is no substitute for either.

What to watch

The webinar is a public chance to hear regional use cases from Cameroon, Senegal, Rwanda and Kenya, and to see how closely they track the whitepaper. Three things would tell readers whether this goes beyond a set of slides:

  • Whether any participating organization states that OCPP-based mobile payments or offline-tolerant charging are in use on a network today, as opposed to planned.
  • Whether AFSEC or UNEP describe specific steps toward continental standards, with dates.
  • Whether OCA puts out a revised version of the emerging-markets paper. The current version is 1.0, and several of OCA's other papers appear in the archive as later versions or editions.

ChargerFeed will report on any concrete commitments that come out of the session.

Sources