Ryan C Briggs

I’ve been in Ghana for about 5 weeks researching electrification projects, and I thought it was about time that I talk about it. In the late 1980s and 1990s, electrification projects became a priority for the Ghanaian government and a large amount of donor funding went towards village electrification. My starting point is a study and government wide plan in 1989. To simplify slightly, there were two main components in the government’s electrification strategy. The first were Self-Help Electrification Projects (SHEPs). SHEPs provided villages with electricity if they were already near high voltage lines and if they could locally provide some of the resources for electrification. Usually it worked out so that if the community could erect the wooden poles for power lines and wire a third of the houses, the government would do the rest. There were a number of successive SHEPs from the 1990s to present.

The second component was the National Electrification Project (NEP). This was an ambitious project that aimed to electrify over 400 villages in Ghana, including all district capitals between 1993 and 1998. It was expected to add over 100,000 new connections to the grid and it was building out the infrastructure that enabled many more SHEPs. When it ended in 2001 it had added 89,000 connections, which is pretty impressive. Conflict in the north was the main reason for missing the connection target and deadline. 

I’m starting out with a basic question: Who got electricity?

There are two ways to answer this. The first it to examine where the government spent resources for electrification. The second is to look at surveys that track who actually had electricity at certain points in time. Below I have regional results for both approaches. To examine who actually got electricity, I looked at results from Ghana Living Standards Surveys in 1991/92 and 1998/99. Both surveys asked respondents to name the main source of light for their home. First, I have a map that shows the percentage of respondents in 1991 who said that they lit their homes with electricity from the national grid:

In 1991, only about a quarter of all Ghanaians had electricity and the spread of electricity was very unequal. The Ashanti and Greater Accra regions had decent access to electricity, but the east and north of the country lagged far behind. The NDC, who was in power from the start of this period until the 2000 election, was explicit about wanting to close this gap. Let’s see if they succeeded.

The map below shows the answers to the same question in 1998:

By the end of the decade, Volta and Western region—and to a lesser extent the surrounding southern regions—made large gains and closed much of the gap with Ashanti. Accra still has a huge lead in electrification with 82% of respondents using it to light their homes. At the time of the survey, much of the planned electrification in and above Northern region was delayed due to conflict. To envision the full impact of electrification from 1991-2000 you should mentally make the northern regions a little darker.

To make the changes more obvious, the map below shows only the percentage point increases in electrification. Here you can see Volta and especially Western region stand out. Western region went from 22% of respondents using electricity for lighting in 1991 to 49% in 1998. Volta went from 10% to 28%.

Finally, I have regional information on financial allocations under the NEP. I received the financing details from the World Bank. The Bank funded about 45% of the NEP, bilateral donors funded about 25%, and the government of Ghana provided funds for about 10% of the project. I don’t know who funded the remaining portion (it is marked as “other”), but it is likely other smaller bilateral donors. Below I have a graph that compares the allocation of money against the the actual percentage point increase in electricity usage.

The graph is slightly misleading because a dollar of funding for electrification might go further in regions with a smaller population or area. On the other hand, a lot of the resources here went to fixed costs such as clearing land and building power lines, so the population problem may not be so bad. There are a few things to note about the graph.

First, Greater Accra and Ashanti were allocated very little money and saw very small gains. They also, however, had high baseline rates of electrification. Second, Western and Volta saw the largest increases in electrification, but Volta didn’t receive that much funding through the NEP. This is an interesting result, as it shows that Volta must have either had a large number of SHEPs or must have received resources through other channels. Third, a lot of money was spent in the north of the country and, as I said earlier, the GLSS in 98 was completed too early to capture it. The correlation between NEP funding and actual electrification is 0.87 if I don’t include Northern, Upper West, and Upper East regions.

Well, that’s it. I’m not going to make bold (or any) conclusions until I have more district-level data and better controls. People familiar with Ghanaian politics, however, can probably spot some interesting patterns.