Application of past lessons in the dissemination of modern energy technologies in Africa: selected recent cases

Abstract

Projects and programmes to disseminate energy technologies in Africa have been undertaken for decades with little success. These have included initiatives to promote and disseminate family and community biogas digesters, improved woodstoves, solar home systems, gasifiers, and biomass briquettes. The predominant causes of failure in most cases have been around flawed approaches to scale up and dissemination. This paper is based on a review of the literature on past energy service delivery initiatives, interviews with key informants and field visits to energy service delivery project in Rwanda, Tanzania and Malawi during 2008. The review found evidence that lessons from past failures are being significantly applied in current efforts to disseminate modern energy services. Among the key lessons are the needs to establish sector-wide capacity covering suitable financing mechanisms, technical training and retraining, operation and maintenance, customer information, local buy-in and ownership, and integration with other ongoing development programmes