Understand User Needs

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Introduction

Designing electricity delivery models for people living in poverty begins with an understanding of the opportunities and constraints arising from the end users’ specific socio-economic and cultural context. These opportunities and constraints may be related to energy but also to other, non-energy factors. This dimension has a broad scope and touches on many of the subsequent dimensions of the toolbox. This section will firstly provide some guiding principles by reviewing some of the broader concepts and secondly hint towards existing tools and resources.

Definitions

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Challenges

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Guiding Principles

There is an increasing amount of evidence that underlines the importance of taking into account the socio-cultural, economic and political dimensions of the specific local contexts in which off-grid energy interventions take place (Ockwell et al. 2018; Ulsrud et al. 2015). The importance of these contextual dimensions can be roughly categorized into three issues: a) understanding needs, b) securing engagement and c) addressing structures of inequality.

Understanding needs

When developing an electrification intervention, understanding aspirations and values of the people that get access to the electricity service is as important as solving the economic challenges (e.g. the accessibility and the financial ability to buy the required appliances). There is a diversity of benefits that electricity users can perceive as valuable, such as business opportunity, the elimination of labour intensive tasks, preservation of health, security, the ability to acquire knowledge, and comfort, among others. Understanding and properly addressing these context specific values of a population is an important factor to ensure communities’ endorsement to electrification interventions (Eder et al., 2015; Hirmer & Guthrie, 2017). The potential effects of access to electricity on practices linked to business activities of the served population are of particular interest in the design and implementation of electrification interventions. These types of effects are often gathered under the term “productive use of electricity” (PUE).

Securing communication and engagement

The process of implementing a new local energy system implies introducing a series of changes in the physical and immaterial aspects of the lives of the local population. It is essential to engage local actors in all the phases of project development – i.e. in the process of introducing changes in their lives – in order to secure sustainable operation of the systems as well as to deliver effective development impacts (Liu & Bah, 2021; Tomei et al., 2020).

One crucial issue is the building and maintaining of trustful communication. This is key in order to build proper understanding of the needs of the users and to ensure that all the actors involved or affected by the electrification initiative understand the project objectives, potential benefits as well as its limitations, i.e. for proper management of expectations (Eder et al., 2015). This implies for instance securing mutual understanding about important design parameters such as tariffs, the costs and rules for connection, the power or the amount of energy available to single users, the schedule of the energy provision, the operation and management arrangements (Eder et al., 2015; Tomei et al., 2020).

Local factors influencing such design parameters can be difficult to determine ex-ante and might become apparent first after the implementation or even the operation of the systems has started. It is also difficult to foresee how the practices of the users will evolve once the use of electricity is integrated in their lives. Thus, maintaining communication channels and – more generally – engagement with the users can be crucial also for managing the future evolution of the systems (Tomei et al., 2020; „Towards People-Private-Public Partnerships“, 2021; Ulsrud et al., 2015).

The local population served can also have additional roles in the electrification scheme, i.e. beyond being the users of the services and the customers of the supply company. The local population can be actively involved in several phases of the project development - including the construction, the operation and the management of the systems (Madriz-Vargas, Bruce, and Watt 2018; Bloem, Swilling, and Koranteng 2021; Ulsrud et al. 2018; Katre and Tozzi 2019; Höffken 2016).

Addressing structures of inequality

It becomes increasingly important to view the needs and constraints of different groups through an energy justice framework. Studies find a strong risk of implementing rural electrification interventions that do not represent a sustainable solution to the structural drivers of energy poverty and do not have the capacity to address social inequalities (Samarakoon, 2020, Monyei et al 2018). This also includes interventions that are addressing productive uses. For example, Sahrakorpi and Bandi (2021) find that programmes promoting use of rice husk processing appliances among women in rural North India led to formal employment opportunities, but their presence did not secure long-lasting women’s empowerment.

Community-based models

Existing Tools

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Bibliography

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