Between providers and users: Redistributors in Nairobi’s fragmented landscape of electricity provision

Abstract

The universalisation of access to electricity in Africa is widely seen as achievable through a form of technification, in which a regular supply of energy is guaranteed by an infrastructure that works quietly and reliably in the background. In most places, however, this promise has been fulfilled only for the wealthiest. This chapter looks at Nairobi to find out why this is the case and how exactly it is managed. It examines the everyday provision of electricity, focusing on two very different types of neighbourhoods within Nairobi’s fragmented electricity landscape. The first is in informal settlements, where local “cartels” connect cables to the national grid and run them to informal settlement residents in order to sell them electricity at a lower price than the public utility would. The second is in upmarket real estate projects, where developers set up their own licensed utilities to buy electricity in bulk from the national grid at a lower price and then sell it to their tenants at a higher price. Both the regulated and unregulated ways of getting electricity to end-users point to the importance of intermediaries, which is often overlooked in conventional studies. The chapter examines how the utility negotiates trade-offs with different types of intermediaries and considers the implications for local electricity supply.