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Off-Grid Enterprise: A Critical History of Small-Scale Off-Grid Solar in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Off-Grid Solar Electrification in Africa

Part of the book series: Energy, Climate and the Environment ((ECE))

Abstract

Since 2009, there has been an unprecedent boom in social enterprise start-up companies selling and marketing off-grid solar products to Africa’s energy poor. This boom has been driven by innovation in off-grid solar financial technologies that have attracted more than US$1 billion in speculative international investment across the continent. In this chapter, we develop a critical history of the off-grid solar boom, tracing it to its early roots as social enterprise experiments, to the dramatic take-off in sales and investment between 2012 and 2016, and then to the more recent crises within the sector starting 2016. In doing so, we illustrate how the explosion in international investment in the sector ultimately came with a Faustian Pact, with profit-making agendas increasingly displacing the social mission of eliminating energy poverty.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Previous events were held in Hong Kong (2018: Global Off-Grid Solar Forum & Expo), Dubai (2015: International Off-Grid Lighting Conference & Exhibition) and Dakar (2012: International Off-Grid Lighting Conference and Trade Fair).

  2. 2.

    This high attendance was despite the emerging Covid-19 pandemic, which at the time prevented many representatives from Chinese off-grid solar manufacturing companies attending.

  3. 3.

    Aside from the award winners, two other products passed the Lighting Global quality-verification test at the conference: The Udaymini solar lamp, made by the multinational lighting company Phillips; and the LED-50 solar lamp made by the German-based company Solux (Lighting Africa, 2010a).

  4. 4.

    Acumen has been a major investor in the off-grid solar sector in Africa, as well as being one of the earliest, with investments in d.light as early as 2008.

  5. 5.

    The competition from ‘generic’ products differs considerably from country to country due to a range of historical and policy factors. A recent survey, for example, found that generic only had 7.6% of Rwanda’s market (i.e., versus 92.4% for branded). In Zambia the generic share was 31.8%, in Kenya it was 46%, in Nigeria it was 67%, in Ethiopia it was 71.2%; in Uganda it was 77.5%, in Niger it was 86%; and in Togo it was 93.3% (see Lighting Global, 2020).

  6. 6.

    West Africa’s mobile banking has grown in both absolute and relative terms. There were about 7.8 million registered mobile banking accounts across West Africa 2012 (about 16.7% of accounts in all of sub-Saharan Africa), which compared at the time to 48.5 million across East Africa (about 76.10% share) (Pénicaud, 2012). The two regions have a nearly equal in terms of population (West Africa is home to 36.8% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population; East Africa is home to 40.6%). By 2020, West Africa’s number of mobile banking account grew to 293 million registered accounts (about 35.9% of the share in sub-Saharan Africa (Andersson-Manjang & Naghavi, 2021).

  7. 7.

    Indeed, recent willingness-to-pay studies have indicated that branded solar products (even with long PAYG solar repayment periods) are ultimately unaffordable for SSA’s rural populace (Grimm et al., 2020; Sievert & Steinbuks, 2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Paul Munro & Shanil Samarakoon

  2. Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Veronica Jacome

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  1. Paul Munro
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Correspondence to Paul Munro .

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  1. International Development Studies, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Nathanael Ojong

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© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Munro, P., Jacome, V., Samarakoon, S. (2022). Off-Grid Enterprise: A Critical History of Small-Scale Off-Grid Solar in Sub-Saharan Africa. In: Ojong, N. (eds) Off-Grid Solar Electrification in Africa. Energy, Climate and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13825-6_2

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