A geospatial perspective on electrification strategy in urbanizing Africa
Most of sub-Saharan Africa's unelectrified live near cities, not in the remote areas rural programmes target
Efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 have largely followed models of rural electrification premised on extending provision to remote, low-income populations, and much of the body of work supporting that goal relies on a binary rural-urban categorisation. Urbanisation in Africa has meanwhile produced complex and densifying human settlement patterns with diverse economic and energetic needs. We evaluate the distribution of the unelectrified across 43 sub-Saharan African countries using the Urban Rural Catchment Area framework, which describes space in 30 categories along a rural-urban continuum defined by travel time to the nearest urban centre and by 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, while 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, amounting to 184 million people, and 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, which suggests that proximity to existing infrastructure is not the binding constraint it is often assumed to be.
Finding that 62% of unelectrified people continent-wide live in or within an hour of a major urban centre, we argue that energy access deficits are clustered in locations that might be better described as urban, urbanizing, or urban-proximate. We take care to note that we do not argue for defunding rural programmes, but rather for a re-targeting of these to truly remote populations, and for a broader recognition that densifying agglomerations and fast-growing communities are an important 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, and this calls for a reorganisation of 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},
}