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The article examines the dynamics of access to electricity in two West African cities: Cotonou (Benin) and Ibadan (Nigeria). Due to poor supply from the grid, households are developing varied ways of accessing electricity, based on different socio-technical dispositifs. In this paper we first demonstrate that access to electricity is based on co-production processes that must be approached from a multi-scale perspective (from the household to the urban scale). We then argue that particular attention to the socio-technical and spatial dimension of co-production arrangements makes it possible to interpret urban electrical configurations and their evolution. We thus show that co-production processes, relying on many actors and technologies to meet a growing and diversified demand for electricity in cities, support an ongoing movement of extension-hybridisation of electricity configurations on an urban scale, thus offering an interesting perspective on power changes in sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity sector reforms have transformed the structure and organization of the sector worldwide. While outcomes of reforms in developed and developing countries have been extensively examined, there is limited analysis of the reforms in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper analyses the performance of electricity sector reforms in 37 SSA countries between 2000 and 2017. We use a stochastic frontier analysis approach to estimate a multi-input multi-output distance function to assess the impact of reform steps and institutional features on indicators of investment and technical efficiency. Results indicate a positive correlation between reforms and installed generation capacity per capita, plant load factor, and technical network losses. The presence of an electricity law, sector regulator, vertical unbundling, and private participation in the management of assets were positively correlated with reform performance. Perceptions of non-violent institutional features such as corruption, regulatory quality and governance effectiveness do not seem to have had a significant effect, but perceptions of political stability, violence, and terrorism influenced reform outcomes. We conclude that a workable reform in SSA involves vertical unbundling with an electricity law, a regulator, and private ownership and management of assets where feasible. However, positive outcomes go hand in hand with higher technical network energy losses which indicates higher investment in the generation segment than in the network segment. Hence, emphasis should be placed on decoupling the energy losses from power generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the scale of energy poverty remains elusive. It is, however, a key metric in the global effort to eradicate poverty. The analysis presented in this paper provides insights into the true scale and impacts of unreliable electricity service provision. The paper introduces a simple and novel approach to quantifying the difference between electricity supply and demand, accounting for both met and unmet demand in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). To assess unmet demand, generator use, reduced utilization due to unreliable electricity service, unrealized demand from unelectrified households, and the effect of tariff reductions are considered. We find that at 2018 prices, SSA (excluding South Africa) on-grid power networks had annual unmet demand of 8.83 TWh for on-grid users and 42.9 TWh with the inclusion of the off-grid sector. With a 50% reduction in tariff by country, the on-grid power sector would face a 21.46 TWh of unmet demand in the region, rising to 55.53 TWh with the inclusion of off-grid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]