Watts to Wealth_ Making Energy Work for Africas Development _ ft Carol Koech

All right.

I think that's where we should start, telling better stories about Africa in regard to energy, you know.

In the context of Africa, energy has almost always been seen as an infrastructure issue in terms of how many mini-grids we build, how many more people we connect, and not so much about the productive use, how it can catalyze development.

And most of the conversation I hope we have today is on how can this be seen as a development multiplier? What are your thoughts in that regard and what are you seeing in the ecosystem?

So if you think about development and energy, you know, you have to look at not just the energy we connect, but we need to look at the amount of energy we consume.

Yes.

An average household in Africa consumes three to five kilowatt hours per month.

Compared to a household in the developed world, which is in excess of...

Let me not even go to the developed world.

Let me talk about an average household in Nairobi is upwards of 300 kilowatt hours.

And the bigger homes, even in excess of 1,000 kilowatt hours.

So you can see the...

The development implications

is

that there is a direct correlation, not between energy access, but between energy consumption and development.

And why do I say this? I say this because that then makes the case for increasing demand, especially in rural communities, by providing equipment that is going to increase the consumption, but then also bring some economic development out of it.

So we need to answer the question around beyond connecting, how do we actually increase the demand and therefore the consumption? I,

you know, I was, I was speaking earlier today, uh, with Emmanuel, um, and, uh, The question about the economics around energy, making it make sense business-wise and translating that into productive use.

And when you think about clean energy, what opportunities does it have to unlock that productive use in different sectors in the continent?

You know, when you think about energy, you have to step back and look and say, what can you do without energy? What can you do without energy? And what can you not do without energy? we couldn't do what we are doing now without energy, could we? No.

The food that we've eaten over lunch, could we do without energy? No.

This event, could it run, let's say we get a blackout and there's no backup power, we're going to stop.

So energy is really central to a lot of the things that we do in our normal day-to-day lives.

But specifically as a tool for, for economic development, I think, and not necessarily looking at it from a cost perspective, but first of all saying, what does energy solve for?

Yeah.