Insights into Rural Energy Needs: 

The workshops shed light on the critical uses of energy in rural households, encompassing lighting, water pumping, refrigeration, and electronic appliances. Public needs, including street lighting, health facilities, schools, and agricultural production, underscore the multifaceted role of energy in rural development. However, the order of relevance and importance sparks discussions, highlighting the need for a strategic approach to electrification. 

Key Drivers and Obstacles: 

Delving deeper, the workshops identified three main clusters affecting the energy system: governance and human resources, financing, and accessibility. The '5 Whys' exercise uncovers root issues, including limited government and public company capacity, high infrastructure costs, and the challenge of balancing poverty levels with commercial electricity rates. 

Recommendations for a Brighter Future: 

A complete report featuring all the insights generated. Drawing from workshop intelligence, a set of recommendations emerges, which we organized in 4 clusters: 

Improve Finance 

• Promote an open market for the energy sector, capable of stimulating a sustainable balance between public and private agencies and intervention. Sustained by an attractive enabling environment for investment that can offer trust and liability to external investors and donors, including reducing risks and evaluating conditions, improving processes, and making them more accessible and transparent. 
• Establish a Rural Electrification Fund, exploring diverse financing alternatives. Rural Electrification cannot be seen as an investment but as a cost for the short-term since it is a development issue and social priority, key to unlock the SDGs. 

• Improve the public finance landscape for the energy sector, including budget planning and allocation mechanisms. Work on new financing mechanisms tailored for small and medium energy companies – commercial banks and other funding institutions. 

   

Increase Coordination 

• Enhance coordination mechanisms within the public sector, both at central and local level, for joint program design, budgeting, and implementation, especially between the productive sectors, including the design of cross-sectoral programs specially focusing on rural issues from a systemic perspective. Alignment with environmental protection should be present at all stages. 
• Increase the participation of Communities in planning and decision making and increase communication and sensibilization initiatives. 
• Integrated planning, bringing together Development partners such as the World Bank, African Development Bank, UNDP, USAID, and others, could benefit the alignment of initiatives and optimization of resources for more effective implementation. 

Build Capacity 

• Accelerate and support the transfer of competencies to the local level, emphasizing training and capacity building for local authorities. 
• Support to make public companies financially healthy, including capacity building (financial, administrative, monitoring, reporting, and planning, considering the sustainability of the works and infrastructure) and compliance mechanisms. 
• Improve local level capacity in the energy sector, including specific technical and professional training in the rural areas, to ensure services. 

• Capacitation and sensibilization of the communities as final end-users and consumers of energy. 

   

Support Innovation 

• Experiment and pilot new independent, autonomous, and off grid means and solutions for rural electrification. Facilitation and incentive for the installation of off-grid independent systems could offer a solution as the grid will only be able to reach in the distant future. The Renewable independent systems piloting and expansion should not be seen as competing with grid expansion, instead it should be looked at as both complementary or as the most viable solution to mitigate the difficulties of rural communities and agriculture. 
• Capacitation of the engineering fields education, and especially technical and professional training centers both at central and local level, including updated curricula aligned with the future of work and new technologies.  

• Foster the emergence and growth of local energy start-ups, that can bring new technologies and solutions to the market. Support R&D functions in Academia and private sector. 

   

In Part 2 of this series, we'll explore further recommendations, solutions, and the crucial role of renewable energy in lighting up the remote corners of Angola. Stay tuned for an illuminating journey through the transformative landscapes of rural energy access as we take some of these recommendations into action.