Lighting up Africa

The Dark Continent -- in one respect the moniker is still accurate, as a quick glance at a night satellite photograph of the globe proves. While the lights of Europe and America twinkle brightly, Africa is swathed in a cloak of blackness.

Even in Africa's most cosmopolitan cities—Johannesburg, Nairobi and Dakar—where the electricity grid is well-established, power cuts are a common aggravation, with neighborhoods suddenly plunged into darkness. To counteract this, the clatter of back-up generators has become a familiar soundtrack to life in the wealthier suburbs.

Development experts have long fretted about the knock-on effect that power shortages have on the continent's ability to haul itself out of poverty. Put in simple human terms, an estimated half a billion people do not have any electricity whatsoever.

It is with a view to plugging the gap that the World Bank is set to unveil its Lighting Africa initiative. The target is to get 250 million Africans supplied with clean-energy lighting by 2030.

Many of the continent's poorest people are dependent on kerosene lamps or candles, and typically spend at least a 10th of their income on lighting their shacks. The future, according to the World Bank, is LED lighting. LEDs are very efficient, in that they use a very small amount of power (typically one watt) but produce enough light to read by. They can also be recharged with mechanically-operated chargers such as hand cranks or pedal power, which makes them particularly suitable for African villages far from the grid.

For now, it looks like it could be some time before the African joke—"What did we do before we used candles? We had electricity"—becomes obsolete.

[Excerpt of an article by Claire Soares, The Independent]