An approach to rural distribution network design for sub-Saharan Africa

The bulk of rural populations in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to electricity and are under-served by any other form of modern infrastructure. The cost of infrastructure to mainly scattered communities has been perennially cited as largely to blame.Quite often rural networks are overdesigned, resulting in under utilization and, therefore, costly overheads. One reason often cited for the overspecification is anticipation of load growth. In most sub-Sahara African rural areas, however, economic growth rates are low, and a designer has no justification in specifying an infrastructure capacity exceeding more than a few percent of existing consumer requirements.This paper proposes methods that critically look at the geometry of small grid network designs to address the construction challenges in rural sub-Saharan Africa.