Mozambique on Thursday launched a $2.1 billion (1.6 billion euro) construction project to connect the southern capital Maputo to a major hydro-electric dam 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles) to the north.

The new high-tension power lines will transport 3,100 megawatts of electricity from the Cahora Bassa Dam to Maputo, overcoming one of the most damaging legacies of a civil war that had split the country between north and south.

"It will end a cycle of an absence of investors because of a lack of energy, and a lack of energy because of the absence of big consumers," Mozambican President Armando Guebuza told a conference of 350 diplomats and aid workers at the launch in Maputo.

The World Bank, the European Investment Bank, Norway and the French Development Agency will carry out the bulk of construction, which will start in 2014 and last three years.

Only 18 percent of Mozambique's 23 million people have access to electricity.

Currently Cahora Bassa supplies energy to the north of the vast country, and to neighbouring economic powerhouse South Africa. Electricity is then transported from South Africa to southern Mozambique.

The project will contribute to a regional power pool that aims to address energy shortfalls across southern Africa. The scheme will also help lessen the region's reliance on coal-fired power plants.

"It is clean, reneweable energy without greenhouse gases, or with very little," Dimitri Kanounnikoff of the French aid agency told AFP.

But the scheme depends on the construction of a second dam downstream from Cahora Bassa on the Zambezi River. The proposed Mphanda Nkuwa dam is managed as a separate project and still lacks funding.