Our new partnership with Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) will enable people living in rural Ethiopia to access renewable energy, and to earn a better income by using energy as effectively as possible.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), just 45% of Ethiopians have access to electricity, which means more than 50 million people lack access to energy.
The Ethiopian government has prioritised universal access to electricity. It aims to reach 100% electrification by 2025, with 35% of the population using off-grid energy solutions and the other 65% of the country connected to the grid.
Using energy productively
However, energy access is not enough by itself to improve incomes. People need access to finance, markets and energy efficient appliances, and to know how to use energy productively.
Source: The World Bank, Ethiopia Socioeconomic Dashboard
The Ethiopia Socioeconomic Dashboards allow users to access official household survey data at the regional level to analyze socio-economic outcomes across the country in a nuanced way to inform program design and monitoring.
The Socioeconomic Dashboards contain visualizations at the national, regional and urban/rural level within each region. The region-level visualizations provide a comprehensive profile of 62 socioeconomic indicators across nine regions and two city administrations, providing comparable trends of socioconomic indicators in Ethiopia.
Written by Ethiopian Energy & Power Business Portal
Part I
The 2020 edition of Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report that monitors and assesses attainments in the global quest for universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy by 2030 is out. The reports says, “Although the world continues to advance toward SDG 7, its efforts fall well short of the scale required to reach the goal by 2030 with a disturbing figure of 789 million people still without access to electricity and 3 billion people without access to clean cooking fuels(2018)”.
If as such is the global reality, what does the statistic show for Ethiopia specifically?
A helicopter view of the report clearly shows that Ethiopia is one of the 20 countries with the largest access deficit, the share of the population having access to electricity still at 45%, and only less than 5% of the population having access to clean fuels, as of 2018.
In population terms, close to 60 million Ethiopians are without access to electricity and almost 98 million people remain without access to clean fuels in the same year and it is the very reason that accelerated investment is needed in the energy sector.
Written by Ethiopian Energy & Power Business Portal
Energy sector Reform: where it stands
(Vivien Foster, 2019), Rethinking Power Sector Reform in the Developing World report suggests that future power sector reforms should be shaped by context, driven by outcomes, and informed by alternatives with a clear departure from the normative 1990s power sector reform prescription which comprised a package of four structural reforms: Regulation (through the creation of an autonomous regulatory entity); Restructuring (entailing corporatization and full vertical and horizontal unbundling of the utility); Private sector participation (particularly in generation and distribution); Competition (ultimately in the form of a wholesale power market).
(AfDB, 2019), Revisiting Reforms in the Power Sector in Africa, asserts that the power sector in Africa still largely retains the traditional integrated monopoly utility structure, although many have included IPPs, despite the standard model Prescription of the reform targeting all segments of the power sector value-chain in Africa, and in very different ways pointing that the standard model reforms generally did not prioritize social and political goals of expanding access to electricity and clean energy sources, nor improving equity or affordability conditions.
