ABSTRACT
With a hot and humid environment where temperatures often range above 22°C, the European understanding of energy poverty, which focuses on a household's thermal comfort, is inapplicable to Africa. Instead, energy poverty on the continent is primarily associated with individuals having no or limited access to modern energy sources such as electricity. In Africa, in 2020, 568 million people had no electricity access, while 1 billion relied on traditional biomass as their primary source of energy for cooking. Despite committed effort, energy poverty persists and provides a significant problem for households.
Access to modern energy is increasingly understood as a fundamental human right, an essential enabler to meet health, well-being, education, social inclusion, and empowerment needs. For example, it is critical for gender equity to serve women's professional and personal aspirations (e.g., storing food for eating and selling, recharging their phones, and watching television). As a result, many tools are being deployed to facilitate access to energy for as many people as possible. But how can we improve what we already have? There are two key topics to explore: energy-as-a-service solutions and demand-side flexibility, that is, when a consumer (prosumer) adapts their consumption to certain incentives central to the EURICA project.
This chapter examines the meaning and challenges of fuel poverty and the responses provided by electrification programmes in Burkina Faso and Madagascar. The EURICA project funded by the EU (project WP 15 LEAP-RE – Grant agreement EU 963530) collected the field data and documentation presented in this chapter. As a result, it critically assesses the relevant policies, schemes, and forecasts promising approaches for the next three years. This chapter aims to provoke a conversation that goes beyond the lack of access challenges, raising the issue of the reliability and quality of energy supply in the African context. Given the extremely high prices and supply security problems in Europe, the experience of African countries seems all the more relevant.
