A geospatial perspective on electrification strategy in urbanizing Africa
Most of sub-Saharan Africa's unelectrified live in or near cities, not in remote rural areas
Read the published paper ↗doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2025.103647
Efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 have largely followed models of rural electrification, premised on extending provision to remote, low-income populations. Much of the supporting work relies on a binary rural-urban categorisation. Urbanisation in Africa has meanwhile produced complex and densifying settlement patterns with diverse economic and energy needs. We evaluate the distribution of the unelectrified across 43 sub-Saharan African countries using the Urban Rural Catchment Area framework. It describes space in 30 categories along a rural-urban continuum, based on travel time to the nearest urban centre and that centre's population size.
We find that access deficits sit far closer to urban centres than the rural framing implies. Areas within one hour's travel of an urban agglomeration hold 47% of the region's population but an outsized 57% of its unelectrified. The most remote areas contain only 5% of the population and 8% of the unelectrified. Cities of 100,000 to 250,000 inhabitants and their catchment areas alone account for 28% of the unelectrified, or 184 million people. These smaller agglomerations are themselves poorly served: electrification reaches 96% in cities above one million inhabitants, against 64% in cities of 50,000 to 100,000 and 54% in the smallest agglomerations of 20,000 to 50,000. Across the region, 29% of the unelectrified live less than 5 km from an electrified area. For them, the availability of physical infrastructure is not the primary barrier to access.
With 62% of unelectrified people continent-wide living in or within an hour of a major urban centre, we argue that access deficits cluster in places better described as urban, urbanising or urban-proximate. We argue that rural programmes should be re-targeted to truly remote populations. Densifying agglomerations and fast-growing communities need more consideration as an entry point to sustainable urban development. A larger share of electricity investment should target medium and small cities, where most of the region's population and new economic activity is clustered. This calls for reorganising implementation strategies to serve diverse communities across the rural-urban spectrum more effectively.
@article{kersey_geospatial_2025,
title = {A geospatial perspective on electrification strategy in urbanizing {Africa}},
volume = {180},
copyright = {All rights reserved},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2025.103647},
doi = {10.1016/j.apgeog.2025.103647},
journal = {Applied Geography},
author = {Kersey, Jessica and Miles, Samuel and Sakhrani, Vivek and Koo, Bryan Bonsuk and Pelz, Setu},
year = {2025},
pages = {103647},
}