The ongo­ing debate over the cost-effec­tive­ness of renew­able ener­gy (RE) and ener­gy effi­cien­cy (EE) deploy­ment often hinges on the cur­rent cost of incum­bent fos­sil-fuel tech­nolo­gies ver­sus the long-term ben­e­fit of clean ener­gy alter­na­tives. This debate is often focused on mature or ‘indus­tri­al­ized’ economies and exter­nal­i­ties such as job cre­ation. In many ways, how­ev­er, the sit­u­a­tion in devel­op­ing economies is at least as or even more inter­est­ing due to the gen­er­al­ly faster cur­rent rate of eco­nom­ic growth and of infra­struc­ture deploy­ment. On the one hand, RE and EE could help decar­bonize economies in devel­op­ing coun­tries, but on the oth­er hand, high­er upfront costs of RE and EE could ham­per short-term growth. The method­ol­o­gy devel­oped in this paper con­firms the exis­tence of this trade-off for some sce­nar­ios, yet at the same time pro­vides con­sid­er­able evi­dence about the pos­i­tive impact of EE and RE from a job cre­ation and employ­ment per­spec­tive. By extend­ing and adopt­ing a method­ol­o­gy for Africa designed to cal­cu­late employ­ment from elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion in the U.S., this study finds that ener­gy sav­ings and the con­ver­sion of the elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply mix to renew­able ener­gy gen­er­ates employ­ment com­pared to a ref­er­ence sce­nario. It also con­cludes that the costs per addi­tion­al job cre­at­ed tend to decrease with increas­ing lev­els of both EE adop­tion and RE shares.