What Can We Learn about Energy Access and Demand from Mobile-Phone Surveys? Nine Findings from Twelve African Countries

Ben Leo, Jared Kalow and Todd Moss
Additional contact information
Ben Leo: Center for Global Development
Jared Kalow: Center for Global Development
Todd Moss: Center for Global Development

No 120, Policy Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: This paper leverages the proliferation of mobile phones in Sub-Saharan Africa to conduct phone-based surveys on energy access and demand. The survey uses interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys to ask questions on energy service provision, service quality, and demand in twelve African countries: Benin, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. From these findings, we draw several potential policy implications. First, both grid electricity and off-grid solutions currently are inadequate to meet many African consumers’ modern energy demands. Second, grid and off-grid electricity are viewed by consumers as complementary, rather than competing, solutions to meet energy demand. Third, a market exists for off-grid solutions even among connected, urban Africans.

Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2018-02-20
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/what-can-we-lear ... l&utm_campaign=repec
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:ppaper:120

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().