From silos to systems: Enabling off-grid electrification of healthcare facilities, households, and businesses in sub-Saharan Africa

The UN has defined Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 to underline its aim to provide access to sustainable, reliable, and modern energy to all by 2030. While energy access issues are commonly discussed in terms of lacking household electrification, they can have dramatic consequences for healthcare facilities that are unable to provide basic medical services such as safely storing medicines and vaccines, powering an incubator for premature babies, or even ensuring proper lighting while medical procedures are performed. In their insightful recent article, Moner-Girona et al. use sophisticated and remarkably encompassing geospatial analyses to identify a considerable electricity access gap of healthcare facilities in Africa. Of the roughly 123,000 facilities they map, they identify approximately 57,000 that have no electricity access. They then estimate the size and cost of location-specific, solar-powered off-grid energy systems needed to electrify these facilities. The urgent question that remains is how this promising, cost-efficient, and environmentally friendly solution can best be designed and implemented to maximize sustainable development (SD) benefits at scale. I believe there are three critical components, namely (1) system-wide off-grid energy solution design approaches, (2) optimized operations strategy building on artificial intelligence (AI) methods, and (3) an adequate enabling environment. This paper addresses these three components in turn