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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]

Sub-Saharan Africa is generally one of the most electricity deprived regions in the world. Since the 1990s, the World Bank and other relevant and respected multilateral organisations have consistently advocated that the required finance to develop sub-Saharan Africa's essential electricity capacity should be sourced from the private sector. However, despite this ongoing advocacy, the private sector has been unenthusiastic to answer this call. Much of the literature attributes this reticence to a lack of 'good governance': principally negative behaviours such as corruption. Instead, in this paper we argue that this is too simplistic an explanation, as private investment has still been able to thrive in other locations where such negative behaviours have existed. To support this argument, we utilise an interdisciplinary approach to review three separate academic governance perspectives, to deliver a more comprehensive view. These are: 1) Financial Investment Governance , the private sector investor's perspective, which focuses on the rules and institutions (or lack of) that directly influence the financial investment environment; 2) Political Governance, the political economy perspective, which relates to the negative, indirect investment consequences resulting from the way that governments govern; and 3) Technological Governance, a 'systems' perspective, which encompasses how the standard structure and organisation of the wider electricity delivery system in each country, negatively impacts such investment. In discussion and conclusion, we find that if the development policy perspective for delivering electricity access to the region is to be successfully constructed around private investment, as the multilateral development community advocates, it will need to accommodate 15 distinct issues that can be identified from this comprehensive review of governance. • Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most electricity deprived regions in the world. • The private sector has been unenthusiastic and reluctant to channel investment towards electricity infrastructure. • This study utilises three different academic approaches to explain why. • These are: 1) Financial Investment Governance , 2) Political Governance, and 3) Technological Governance. • A synthesis identifies 15 distinct governance issues that need overcome to better govern energy poverty and development. [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]

Poverty and lack of access to electricity are highly correlated. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the poorest regions in the world, two in every three people have no access to electricity. This paper describes a purpose designed model to explore and project the development in the Sub-Saharan African electricity sector in Baseline and Universal access scenarios. The results provide insight into the role of different systems and technologies in providing access to electricity in the region and associated investment requirements. We project that Baseline developments do not lead to universal access to electricity, especially in Eastern Africa and the rural areas. The results show that central grid extension should be complemented with off-grid systems (mini-grid and stand-alone) to increase access in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, the targeted level of consumption has large implications on the preferred electrification technology and associated investment requirements. For low levels of consumption, off-grid technologies are the most important technologies to increase access rate, while for high levels of consumption, extending the central grid is more economical. Total cumulative investment in the period 2010-2030 amount to 22 billion USD for low levels of consumption and exceed 2.5 trillion USD for high levels of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper focuses on public utilities services located in poor countries with a special attention to capture and corruption issues. It confronts the optimal policy of Auriol and Picard [Privatization in Developing Countries and the Government Budget Constraint, Nota di Lavoro 75.2002. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Milan, Italy] regarding private sector involvement in public utilities with empirical evidence on water and electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). As predicted by the theory, the participation of private unregulated firms in the supply of services for the middle class and poor people is fairly common in SSA. By contrast, services for rich people are provided by public utilities. Theory suggests that their prices should be high so that the public firms make a profit. Yet piped water and electricity are subsidized. This suggests that there is a problem of capture by the ruling elite. Since ruling elites design privatization programs, there is concern about their optimality. The paper shows that the social cost of corrupted privatization is non-monotone in the opportunity cost of public funds. Because of the fiscal loss it represents, privatizing profit centers of public firms entails huge social costs in very poor countries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Electricity access deficit in Sub-Saharan Africa is not only a supply issue, demand side barriers account for a large share of the deficit. • Demand constraints include income regularity, housing quality, and the lack of complementary inputs needed to use electricity productively. • Households associate electrification primarily with the prospect of income-generating activities in their communities. This paper uses recent individual and household-level data from various sources covering over 30 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, along with qualitative fieldwork in selected countries, to shed light on demand-side constraints to electricity access. First, it uses a simple accounting identity to decompose the electricity access gap into supply, demand, and mixed demand–supply factors. Results show that the demand factors account for over two-fifth of electricity access deficit across the region whereas electrification efforts have largely focused on supply issues. Second, the paper combines regression and qualitative fieldwork analysis to examine household and community characteristics that affect electricity uptake. It finds that at the household level, while the level of income is a primary driver of uptake, the regularity of income is as important. The quality of housing is also a consistently significant predictor. At the community-level, the results show that higher uptake is associated with communities that are better endowed with other infrastructures including public services. This finding is consistent with qualitative evidence supporting that households associate electricity access primarily with the prospect of more productive economic activities. Policies focusing on lowering access costs, streamlining flexible bill payments and connection mechanisms, and efforts to target, or bundle with, complementary income-generating inputs should go hand in hand with supply-side efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the generation of electricity from biomass sources in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) between 2003 and 2012. The electrification rate in SSA was 32% as compared to 92, 70 and 94% in China and East Asia, South Asia and Latin America, respectively. This is a serious issue that affects development. An estimated 620 million people in SSA have no access to electricity. Yet SSA abounds in biomass resources, it produces less than 1% of its electricity from biomass. The structure of electricity production in SSA shows that generation mix is dominated by hydropower (23%) and fossil fuels (73.3%). There has been a significant temporal variation in the quantum of electricity produced from biomass in SSA between 2003 and 2012. The trend has been rather static. Only 13 countries in SSA produce electricity from biomass sources. However, there are significant spatial variations with Eastern and Southern Africa producing more electricity from biomass sources than Western Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]