Access to Electricity in Informal Settlements: The Case of Accra, Ghana

The absence of reliable electricity impedes the ability of informal settlement dwellers to escape poverty and live safe, healthy, productive lives: without reliable power, students struggle to study after dark, workers struggle to perform their jobs, and everyone faces personal safety threats when public spaces are not illuminated after dark. While official statistics report high levels of electricity, a new policy brief on electricity in three informal settlements in Accra, Ghana in shows that this access is inaccurate and largely illegal.

“Powering the Slum: Meeting SDG 7 in Ghana’s Informal Settlements” reports on a 2019-20 study, sponsored by Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy (KCEP), by a research team composed of local researchers and headed by Penn IUR Fellow James Mensah, Chief Resilience Officer, Accra Metropolitan Assembly and lecturer, University of Ghana, and Penn IUR Co-Director Eugénie Birch that looked at the situation systematically. It reviews conditions in Accra, Ghana's informal settlements and recommends policies for meeting Sustainable Development Goal 7 to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.”

The team held focus group interviews in three of Accra’s slum communities: Agbogbloshie, Chorkor, and Avenor. These areas are the city’s most deprived, characterized by high rates of poverty and large agglomerations of dilapidated housing. People in these settlements lack tenure security, basic infrastructure (water and sewer), and services (education, fire, police) and are regularly exposed to eviction, disease, and violence.

The team documented how the residents secured electricity. They found that the ECG, the national electricity utility of Ghana, requires a customer to produce a land title, site plan, and building permit—documentation that slumdwellers do not have. Consequently, those who live in informal settlements turn to illegal means. For example, some pay a middleman to acquire a meter. Often that household will then “rent” access to it to their neighbors, who tap into it with nails and wires (a particularly unsafe, fire-prone method). The result: high, unstable pricing for electrical power and a dangerous situation for all. Electrical fires occur frequently in informal settlements.

Since electricity is expensive, people limit its use, reserving it for lighting, ironing, freezing food, and powering television—but not for cooking. Instead, they burn charcoal or wood for cooking, which is another health hazard not only conducive to fires but also to respiratory disease from the smoke.

The research team offered several recommendations for improving the situation:

• Provide legal recognition of informal settlements (i.e. tenure security), 
• Relax the rigorous prerequisites for securing meters (reforms might include maintaining building codes necessary for the safe delivery of electricity but eliminating others that have little relevance to energy access)
• Re-organize the meter sales and tariff rates (ECG’s current pre-paid system is cumbersome and may encourage illegal connections), and 
• Rely more on renewable energy (e.g. off-grid options such as solar or waste-to-energy systems). 

Based on this research, KCEP is sponsoring a follow-up study for 2020-21 on how to implement the recommendations.