Equitable Electrification on an Urbanizing Planet

Abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing profound demographic and spatial transformations driven by sustained urbanization. Thousands of new towns and cities are emerging in erstwhile rural areas while peri-urban zones expand rapidly around existing cities. Importantly, most new urban growth is informal and occurs beyond the scope of formal city planning regimes. These dynamics present a complex and urgent challenge for the delivery of infrastructure services — specifically electricity, which is the focus of this dissertation — capable of satisfying basic human needs and alleviating poverty through broader macroeconomic growth. Access to “affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy” in line with Sustainable Development Goal 7 remains uneven across urban and urbanizing spaces. Hundreds of millions lack any type of access to electricity, and many more face unreliable, unsafe, and/or poor-quality service.

This dissertation offers an empirically-driven investigation of electricity access across urbanizing Africa, aiming to generate policy-relevant insights for the diverse community of practice working to improve energy services for low-income urban residents. It offers a critical examination of the limitations of treating the centralized grid as the default model of electricity provision, and in doing so foregrounds the urgency of recognizing and addressing urban forms of electricity (in)access. This research draws from multiple disciplines, including engineering, geography, and urban studies, and creatively integrates epistemologies and methodologies from each to offer a multidimensional understanding of urban energy poverty. Several chapters are grounded in insights from Spotlight Kampala, a participatory action research initiative carried out with community leaders from 25 informal settlements in Uganda’s capital city.

Chapter 1, “Geospatial perspectives on electrification strategy in urbanizing Africa”, explores how the persistent use of a rural-urban binary spatial framework has limited our understanding of where and how energy poverty manifests across urbanizing Africa, and how more nuanced new spatial frameworks can aid planners by providing improved visibility on the demographic dynamics and changing energetic needs of communities. It provides new empirical evidence on the urbanization of energy poverty across SSA.

Chapter 2, “Grid connections and inequitable access to electricity in African cities”, offers a grounded, empirical account of infrastructural hybridity from a case study of informal settlements in Kampala, Uganda. It examines how informal grid connection strategies — such as meter sharing and grid tapping — offer important avenues for access while producing differentiated and often inequitable services.

Chapter 3, “Community-based solutions for improving electricity access in informal settlements”, leverages participatory action research traditions to identify grounded strategies for overcoming electricity access barriers within low-income urban communities. Centering the voices of community members, it highlights priorities and solutions co-developed and evaluated through dialogue with residents and local stakeholders. By demonstrating how community-led research and multi-stakeholder collaboration can generate practical, creative solutions to inform policymaking, this chapter underscores the potential of participatory approaches to advance energy justice and deepen infrastructural citizenship.

Finally, chapter 4, “A user-centered, visual account of urban energy transitions” operationalizes photography as a form of visual storytelling to represent the lived energetic realities of informal communities. Drawing on traditions of documentary photography and visual sociology, this chapter aims to make the everyday interactions between people and electricity visible to diverse technical, policy, and planning audiences.