Africa needs systemic approach to boost energy access
AS a systemic shock, the COVID-19 crisis affects all continents, social classes, levels of government and nearly all sectors of the economy, as well as the way we travel, consume and organise our work.
Many see a path of “green recovery” as the best way out — but combining this new challenge with the well-known fight against energy poverty will need creativity and a diversity of solutions.
Africa in general, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, is a future lab to show if and how it will be possible to achieve a number of sometimes conflicting goals posed by the “energy triangle” during the pandemic and beyond: namely, addressing the challenges of economic development and growth, energy security and access, and environmental sustainability — all at the same time.
Following the approach in this 2018 World Economic Forum paper, all actors will have to acknowledge the need to develop different transition paths and roadmaps for different country-specific and regional challenges, which will also reflect the complexity of the energy system.
Many transition stories focus on electrification in combination with renewables — which requires large infrastructure investments and stable economic and political conditions. Some of these approaches tend to follow the goal of sustainability at the expense of real and fast progress in personal safety and economic development.
A thorough and comprehensive system-dynamics modelling approach will not only consider the unintended consequences of desirable measures; it will also examine the desirable consequences of measures and means that seem to contradict the purist’s path of net-zero energy.
Within this context, waste to energy and liquefied petroleum gas have been proposed as safe, quick and affordable functional equivalents of biomass for meeting household energy needs in order to accelerate energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, where energy consumption is largely driven by traditional uses such as biomass for cooking, which constitutes 80% of residential consumption.
Safe and healthy cooking remains a major challenge in sub-Saharan Africa; besides the safety hazards associated with indoor pollution and forest degradation, the amount of unpaid time it takes (mostly women) to collect biomass fuel, but also for cooking itself, is a typical blindspot, reducing household productivity and increasing health risks.
The current situation is summarised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in its 2019 report, Achieving clean energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, which states: Only about half of the people insub-Saharan Africa have access to electricity; only one third have access to clean cooking methods; and 13 countries in SubSaharan Africa have less than 25% access to electricity, compared to only one in developing Asia.
In addition, the results of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa will create a number of challenges in other areas like urban planning and infrastructure, leading to overcrowding, traffic congestion, pollution and localised resource depletion.