More than 800 million people worldwide, many that live in sub-Saharan Africa, lack access to electricity. Ensuring such access is a necessary first step to ensure that the absence of affordable electricity does not become a barrier to economic growth. In rural areas, where access remains the greatest challenge, electricity is closely tied to other development outcomes: mechanization of agriculture and livestock systems, the shift from subsistence farming toward value-added production, and broader measures of human development.

The energy development community has lacked a reliable way to quantify non-household power demand or the manual substitutes. In the absence of such data, energy planning has focused primarily on the least-cost delivery of residential electricity. Investment decisions are made based on assumptions about where demand exists; without quantifying actual or potential non-household demand, planners cannot determine which technologies to deploy, where to invest, or what returns those investments might generate.

To address this evidence gap, Columbia World Projects partnered with the Government of Uganda and organizations with expertise in large-scale field research, to identify where energy investment could most benefit local economies. The initial aim was to make this information accessible to investors and policymakers. Over the course of the project, this evolved into an effort to develop lean, open-source tools that can guide investment decisions helping governments, energy service companies, and investors identify income-generating anchor loads such as irrigation, small-scale farming, food processing and storage, and light industry. The developed tools also address how to provision these loads cost-effectively, to signal opportunities for co-investment to other rural development actors, and how to coordinate across sectors so that the resulting effects on household income and electricity demand, both traditionally slow to grow, become visible.

Through these partnerships and innovative data collection, analysis, and scaling, other countries beyond Uganda have identified similar needs.

Partners:

• Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, Government of Uganda
• Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industries and Fisheries, Government of Uganda
• Ministry of Local Government, Government of Uganda
• Ministry of Water and Environment, Government of Uganda
• Uganda Energy Credit Capitalisation Company (UECCC)
• Winch Energy Uganda
• Agriworks, Uganda
• United Nations Capital Development Fund