Since the last decade, ecological preservation has become a critically debated topic in developing and developed nations. Hence, to ensure environmental sustainability, countries and international bodies have canvassed for measures that support severe restrictions to protect the Earth's biodiversity. This study's objectives were two-fold: the sole effect of renewable energy on ecological sustainability and second, identify the impacts of external debt and financial globalisation in the renewable energy-ecological sustainability nexus, both within the Environmental Kuznet Curve (EKC) framework for 44 African economies. Second-generation estimation techniques were employed and deduced inferences from the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag method used in the study. The study empirically demonstrated that renewable energy is insignificant for ecological sustainability without debt stock and financial globalisation. However, the inclusion of both variables revealed that while renewable energy and financial globalisation accelerated ecological sustainability, external debt worsened it in the short and long-term periods. Therefore, the study proposed amongst others that for the productive benefits of renewable energy use to human and environmental well-being, policymakers must execute clean energy portfolios by restricting brown energy use. This measure will require considering introducing a significant amount of carbon tax or emission permit and incentivising businesses to adopt green technologies.

This research is informed by the reality that Sub-Saharan Africa requires new sources of energy for development and sustainability, but with minimum negative effects on the environment. This paper looks at the role played by financial market and financial institutions in the consumption of renewable energy in four Sub-Saharan African countries between 1995 and 2022. According to the IPAT model, we estimate our model through Panel Corrected Standard Errors and Feasible Generalized Least Squares to maintain the robustness of our test. The results reveal a clear divergence: while the financial markets and the financial institutions are both adding to the renewable energy consumption, the later has a greater influence. This implies that financial markets in the current region are relatively inefficient in facilitating the uptake of renewable energy. The findings of this study bear some significant policy implications as follows; policymakers should ensure the soundness of the financial institutions so as to finance the renewable energy investment for sustainable growth in SSA.