<p>Energy poverty is one of the major cause of concern among many countries in the World in which African nations are not an exception. Despite having abundance natural resources that can be used in supporting energy development, the African nations are wallowing in serious energy poverty problems. Thus, this research examines on how energy poverty could be alleviated focusing more on the capitalization of natural resources rents in the presence of strong governance. Therefore, the ‘resource curse’ and ‘resource bless’ hypothesis are tested in the context of energy poverty. To this end, the data of the fourteen natural resources-rich countries African nations, for the period 1990 to 2021 is employed and the ‘Methods of Moment Quantile Regression’ and ‘Panel Correlated Standard Errors’ tools are used in the analysis. The study results depict that natural resources rents, strong governance and financial development improves the access to electricity. Financial development and natural resources rents presents symmetric favourable results in all quantiles, while governance presence asymmetric effects. The importance of natural resources rents in supporting access to electricity in this research supports the ‘resource bless’ theory; hence, disapproving the widely agreed existence of a ‘resource curse’ in developing nations. However, weak governance in the short run, high inflation rate, trade openness and foreign direct investment lowers the access to electricity, while economic growth’s effect is weak negative and insignificant. The detrimental influence of trade openness and foreign direct investment calls for robust trade policies to be adopted.</p>