LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND: BOTTOM-UP ENERGY TRANSFORMATION OF LAST-MILE COMMUNITIES

As of 2023, according to IRENA, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for 80% of the population living in energy poverty, the same 600 million people who lack access to electricity are also the most vulnerable to climate change, where one-third of the world’s droughts occur. The fact that only 57% of the SSA population has access to grid infrastructure poses an immense challenge to water, energy, and food (WEF) security, and exacerbates a vicious cycle of poverty and inequity.

The SWARM-E LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND: BOTTOM-UP ENERGY TRANSFORMATION OF LAST-MILE COMMUNITIES project (in short, SWARM-E) is an inter-disciplinary collaborative project between European and African research institutions and the private sector proposes a solution to create, maintain, and scale affordable, reliable, modern, and sustainable access to clean energy that leaves no one behind and meets the energy, water and food productivity needs of all users in communities in the SSA. The solution is a bottom-up modular and dynamic infrastructure called SWARM electrification (SWARM-E) which deploys a circular renewable energy system called a SWARM grid in which households and businesses with solar home systems (SHS) are interconnected with those without via a low-voltage distribution grid. The infrastructure, developed and already implemented by partners SOL and MEI in Bangladesh, will be adapted for the SSA context for the first time, enabling affordable local energy ownership via peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity sharing. SWARM grids can be interconnected to scale reliable energy access and then interconnected to local decentralized renewable energy infrastructure (i.e., mini-grid) where they exist, creating SWARM grid+, to further reduce the redundancy of obsolete energy infrastructure. SWARM-E will tailor the SWARM grid to the SSA context and develop the enabling ecosystem of SWARM grid+ to enable their success. The project also aims to ensure scientific diplomacy between EU and AU countries to show how the private sector and national regulatory bodies can utilize and replicate the project results in other areas of SSA and help improve market uptake of life-enhancing productive uses.