“Modern energy for all,” an internationally supported initiative to connect populations to electricity services, is expected to help reduce poverty-induced vulnerabilities. It has become a primary strategy for meeting sustainable development goals, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. However, when electricity is supplied by a capacity-constrained grid to a resource-constrained population, the service quality can vary both spatially and temporally. This research explores the quality of electricity services based on a case study of Unguja, Tanzania. Using 1) open-ended interviews, 2) detailed electricity-systems monitoring, and 3) household surveys, we show how voltage quality varies significantly, even within highly localized settings. Fluctuations result in dim lights at best and power outages and broken appliances at worst, denying many Unguja residents the expected benefits of access to modern energy. By combining an extensive understanding of the physical system together with interviews and surveys, this work presents a unique mapping of voltage quality in a system that is financially and physically constrained and highlights the consequences of poor-quality service for poor users.
TitleThe prepaid electric meter: Rights, relationships and reification in Unguja, Tanzania b s t r a c tSustainable Development Goal 7, with the light bulb and power button as its symbols, in effect promotes the universal right to basic electricity services. Access for all demands both affordability and costrecovery, and utilities (and donors) increasingly require users to shoulder the greater burden of costrecovery. We argue that the electricity system is underpinned by a set of relationships among user, provider and the service itself: these relationships are mediated by the meter, the technology of commodification. Using a constant-comparison approach, and based on a year of interviews and document analysis, we compare postpaid and prepaid meter regimes in Unguja, Tanzania. We ask: what difference does the mode of payment make to the (residential) user, the utility, and to the prospects for meeting SDG 7? We find that the prepaid meter becomes reified with its automated monitoring and measurement mechanism, rendering the once-familiar meter reader obsolete, and shutting off the flow of electricity as soon as the customer's ''units" have run down. Reification makes the utility more invisible to the customer, who now blames the meter rather than the utility for poor service or high bills. Our interviews reveal broad support for the prepaid meter, however, because economically vulnerable users expressed greater fear of debt than of the dark, and were willing to cede control of their consumption to the new meter. These findings undermine the common accusation of a ''culture of nonpayment" in Africa. We also find that prepaid meters may incentivize the partial return to biomass-based fuels when cash is not available -exactly the behavior that universal access to electricity is supposed to prevent. We conclude that, if access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa becomes entirely contingent on payment prior to use, this is not fully compatible with a commitment to universal basic access.
Network connectivity is often one of the most challenging aspects of deploying sensors. In many countries, cellular networks provide the most reliable, highest bandwidth, and greatest coverage option for internet access. While this makes smartphones a seemingly ideal platform to serve as a gateway between sensors and the cloud, we find that a device designed for multi-tenant operation and frequent human interaction becomes unreliable when tasked to continuously run a single application with no human interaction, a somewhat counter-intuitive result. Further, we find that economy phones cannot physically withstand continuous operation, resulting in a surprisingly high rate of permanent device failures in the field. If these observations hold more broadly, they would make mobile phones poorly suited to a range of sensing applications for which they have been rumored to hold great promise.
Electricity users in sub‐Saharan Africa face persistent unreliable and unaffordable access. However, users' perspectives and experiences have largely been absent from policy literature. Content analysis of energy access policy literature reveals two long‐held assumptions: (1) any connection is better than no connection; (2) residents who object to this poor access have an entitlement problem. This paper critically interrogates these assumptions by using ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork in Unguja, Tanzania. It finds that long‐held policy justifications are easily contravened by real‐life experiences of sub‐par service and counters conventional narratives that blame users for the failure of electricity systems in their communities.
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