A New Electrification Model to End Energy Poverty: An example from a novel rural electrification approach in Madagascar

Highlighted by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to ensure universal access to clean, reliable and modern energy services by 2030, the world is increasingly getting concerned by the energy poverty and its consequences on human development and the environment. Yet, even if numerous initiatives and a significant amount of money are directly addressed to tackle the energy-access challenges, a billion people are still denied access to basic and modern electricity services, especially in rural places of Sub-Saharan Africa and SouthEast Asia. The African continent has seen in the past two decades an encouraging improvement as the number of people gaining access to electricity rose from 9 million per year between 2000 and 2013 to 20 million per year between 2014 and 2019, outpacing for the first time population growth. However, the vast majority of those recent improvements are mainly restricted to urban and peri-urban areas of a small number of countries located in Eastern or Western Africa and the population without access to electricity in Africa is expected to increase in the coming years following the health crisis and economic downturn caused by Covid-19. This definitely proves the fragility and the poor resilience of the electrification solutions favored nowadays. While grid extension and conventional microgrids suffer from low inclusivity and replicability, Solar Home Systems are only a stopgap measure failing to boost socioeconomic development. A third way must be proposed to combine quick and affordable access to basic electricity services and a community uplift through socioeconomic development, answering both greatest challenges that the developing countries are struggling to cope with nowadays. With this objective in mind, Nanoé, a French-Malagasy social company, is developing the Lateral Electrification model based on the collaborative and progressing building of electric infrastructures, which is presented in this article, first from a general point of view then through a focus on Nanoé's experience in Madagascar.