In this utility and research perspectives paper by Mwesiga Peter Musinguzi, Project Manager – Strategic Projects, Umeme, and Jessica Kaitlin Kersey, Project Lead, Spotlight Kampala, University of California, Berkeley, the authors examine promoting access to and use of electricity in informal settlements in Uganda.
Achieving universal access to electricity in Uganda’s cities is challenged by the country’s rapid urbanisation. Each year, the urban population grows by 300,000 people, with a significant number of these settling informally. In Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, there are currently over 57 informal settlements housing over half a million inhabitants.
Most are located at the periphery of major institutions like hospitals, universities, prisons, road and railway reserves, refugee collection zones, and vacant underdeveloped land. They occupy flood-prone areas, erecting shanties and temporary unplanned structures and live under a constant threat of eviction. Most are extremely low-income, depending on day-to-day income from informal employment.
Providing access to the electricity grid in these environments is difficult. While 63% of urban households are connected to the national electricity grid in Uganda, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (2020), 96% of the residents in Kampala’s informal settlements continue to rely on biomass fuels for cooking and only 36% have access to a safe electricity connection.
Despite this, electricity remains an essential input to the vibrant economies within informal communities, and the provision of safe, affordable, reliable electricity can improve livelihoods and well-being. Collaborative approaches, such as social engineering and the utility-research partnerships explored here, are urgently needed to improve service delivery.
Pamoja means “together” in Swahili. The Pamoja Project is a pilot initiative introduced by Umeme Ltd in 2019 to test the impact of evolving the way it operates in informal settlements on overall service delivery by actively partnering with the communities through their leaders, resident institutions and NGOs. This is to jointly identify and implement social economic initiatives (CSR initiatives) alongside service provision, to create trusting relationships rather than depending on enforcement for recovery of illegal connections. The project aims at partnering technology with social engineering to improve service delivery in these communities.
While Umeme has drastically reduced electricity distribution losses from 38% to below 16% by 2020 (pre-COVID 19), it has faced challenges in improving electricity safety, distribution efficiencies and service delivery to informal settlements. Over 40% of the electricity supplied on networks along informal settlements is lost due to illegal connections. These, including underground unsafe extensions, expose residents to safety incidents.
Dwellers in informal settlements have always been suspicious of government and enforcement authorities. Experience has shown that they treat utility providers with the same suspicion and will work to protect their space and this can even turn violent.
Over the years, Umeme had predominantly used enforcement to recover illegal connections from informal settlements, only for them to return within a few days. This has increased the feeling of hostility towards the utility operations in these areas.
Engaging with communities and working with resident NGOs to conduct social needs studies, Umeme partnered with local leaders and institutions and appointed zone champions to jointly identify and implement preferred social initiatives.
Partner institutions include Makerere University, the directorate of Industrial Training of the Ministry of Education and Sport, ACTogether and local community training artisans. Initiatives implemented include the installation of street lighting in identified dark spots, skilling of vulnerable youth in tailoring, hairdressing, food entrepreneurship, and domestic installations.
The trained youth are now able to earn income while the people also feel involved in decisions that affect their communities. It has provided Umeme with an opportunity to localise awareness around its processes and products, while also allowing the trained youth to acquire an income from the learned skills.
Umeme’s Pamoja programme is complemented by the efforts of Spotlight Kampala – a research initiative launched in 2021 with the objective of providing grounded, large-scale empirical data and insights on the status of electricity access in Kampala’s informal settlements.
Spotlight Kampala is led by the University of California, Berkeley, and Makerere University, with ACTogether Uganda, Washington State University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Arizona State University as members of the larger consortium.
Spotlight Kampala highlights the unique role of applied research in supporting efforts to improve electricity service. Neutrality and innovation are key elements of this role. Researchers are seen by most communities as neutral compared to utility or government actors, allowing them to engage in deeper conversations around sensitive topics.
Researchers are also well-positioned to leverage innovative technologies. As an example, Spotlight Kampala deployed remote power quality sensors which provide real-time readings on voltage and frequency. This data provides a unique picture of reliability and voltage quality and informs new understanding of what it means to have access to electricity.
Moving beyond simple definitions of access as a connection to the grid, this unique dataset provides insight into additional access challenges such as frequent and prolonged outages and undervoltage and overvoltage which can damage appliances and dim lighting, among other impacts.
Over 500 surveys and nearly 70 interviews have been completed across a wide range of community members and stakeholders and collected two months of power quality monitoring data from 150 participants. This diverse methodological approach has produced novel, actionable insights.
As an example, surveys showed that nearly half of households and businesses in informal settlements access the grid through collective connections where one person obtains a meter and feeds a line to neighbours or tenants.
This type of connection provides an easy way for low-income households to access the grid. However, the research also revealed important challenges, such as the ability of the meterholder to turn power on and off to punish tenants, or to charge rates above the published tariff.
Spotlight Kampala has liaised closely with Umeme and other stakeholders to share these and other insights. This collaborative effort provides an excellent case study of how researchers can work alongside utilities and governments to provide timely, objective data to guide policy and programmatic interventions to improve electricity service delivery in informal communities.
The Pamoja pilot also re-emphasizes that to fast-track meaningful sustainable access to electricity in informal vulnerable communities, technological approaches need to be complemented by social initiatives, with community members actively participating in decisions that influence their welfare and livelihoods. ESI
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