Recent fore­casts sug­gest that African coun­tries must triple their cur­rent elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion by 2030. Our mul­ti­cri­te­ria assess­ment of wind and solar poten­tial for large regions of Africa shows how eco­nom­i­cal­ly com­pet­i­tive and low-environmental–impact renew­able resources can sig­nif­i­cant­ly con­tribute to meet­ing this demand. We cre­at­ed the Mul­ti­cri­te­ria Analy­sis for Plan­ning Renew­able Ener­gy (MapRE) frame­work to map and char­ac­ter­ize solar and wind ener­gy zones in 21 coun­tries in the South­ern African Pow­er Pool (SAPP) and the East­ern Africa Pow­er Pool (EAPP) and find that poten­tial is sev­er­al times greater than demand in many coun­tries. Sig­nif­i­cant frac­tions of demand can be quick­ly served with “no-regrets” options—or zones that are low-cost, low-envi­ron­men­tal impact, and high­ly acces­si­ble. Because no-regrets options are spa­tial­ly het­ero­ge­neous, inter­na­tion­al inter­con­nec­tions are nec­es­sary to help achieve low-car­bon devel­op­ment for the region as a whole, and inter­con­nec­tions that sup­port the best renew­able options may dif­fer from those planned for hydropow­er expan­sion. Addi­tion­al­ly, inter­con­nec­tions and select­ing wind sites to match demand reduce the need for SAPP-wide con­ven­tion­al gen­er­a­tion capac­i­ty by 9.5% in a high-wind sce­nario, result­ing in a 6–20% cost sav­ings, depend­ing on the avoid­ed con­ven­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy. Strate­gic selec­tion of low-impact and acces­si­ble zones is more cost effec­tive with inter­con­nec­tions com­pared with solu­tions with­out inter­con­nec­tions. Over­all results are robust to mul­ti­ple load growth sce­nar­ios. Togeth­er, results show that mul­ti­cri­te­ria site selec­tion and delib­er­ate plan­ning of inter­con­nec­tions may sig­nif­i­cant­ly increase the eco­nom­ic and envi­ron­men­tal com­pet­i­tive­ness of renew­able alter­na­tives rel­a­tive to con­ven­tion­al generation.