  Electricity is one of the most crucial resources that drives any given
nation's growth and development. The latest Sustainable Development Goals
report indicates Africa still has a high deficit in electricity generation.
Concentrating solar power seems to be a potential option to fill the deficit.
That is because most of the components of concentrating solar power plants are
readily available on the African market at affordable prices, and there are
qualified local persons to build the plants. Pilot micro-concentrating solar
power plants have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa and have shown
promising results that could be expanded and leveraged for large-scale
electricity generation. An assessment of a pilot concentrating solar power
plant in the sub-region noticed one noteworthy obstacle that is the failure of
the tracking system to reduce the operating energy cost of running the tracking
control system and improve the multifaceted heliostat focusing behavior. This
paper highlights the energy situation and the current development in
concentrating solar power technology research in Africa. The paper also
presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art solar tracking systems
for central receiver systems to illustrate the current direction of research
regarding the design of low-cost tracking systems in terms of computational
complexity, energy consumption, and heliostat alignment accuracy.
