Giving Up on Grids

摘要

In Kenya, one million households use car batteries as their main source of electricity. From Lagos to Nairobi, even the poorest slum dwellers are driven to purchase fuel that can create power to charge cell-phone batteries and provide light. In all, more than half of Africans south of the Sahara-500 million people-aren't connected to a national electricity grid and probably never will be. In some countries, such as Malawi and Congo, fewer than 10 percent of the people are connected to the national grid. Yet the demand is there: the World Bank estimates that Africans spend $40 billion a year on off-grid power.