ENERGY-BURKINA FASO: To Get Electricity, Try People Power

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Brahima Ouedraogo

OUAGADOUGOU, Jun 15 2004 (IPS) - Wendemi Yanogo owns a small dairy just outside Burkina Faso’s capital. At present, she earns about 50 cents for every litre of milk that she sells in Ouagadougou. By next month, however, Yanogo hopes to see the profits from her business double – after the small town she lives in, Tanghin Dassouri, gets electricity.

“Using electricity, I’m going to increase my production and earn more money by turning the milk into yoghurt,” says Yanogo, adding: “We’re waiting for the electricity with a mixture of joy and impatience, because we know that it contributes to development wherever it is installed.”

She was amongst the first to support the idea of establishing a co-operative to set up electricity infrastructure in Tanghin Dassouri with a view to buying power from the national electricity provider. This electricity will be resold to the town’s 26,000 inhabitants.

Yanogo has already bought five shares in the co-operative at a price of 3.7 dollars per share, and hers will be one of the 700 households to get connected next month. The plan is to extend the grid throughout Tanghin Dassouri – although no time frame has yet been set for this expansion.

Initially, the co-operative planned to raise about 1,850 dollars to provide it with capital to get the project underway. However, the idea proved so popular that it ultimately managed to gather just over 7,400 dollars.

This enthusiasm convinced the government and other groups to lend the co-operative 40 percent of the total amount needed to set up the necessary infrastructure in Tanghin Dassouri: almost 291,000 dollars. This amount was required by the contractor before work on the project could begin. The remaining 60 percent of expenses is being covered by lending institutions.

“Electricity is a powerful tool for development and reducing poverty. That’s why we’ve organised this project,” El Hadj Boureima Sawadogo, President of Tanghin Dassouri’s co-operative, told IPS.

“Having electrical power is a starting point for anything you might want to do. With electricity, we can develop other production sectors. For example, we can use it for pumping water to irrigate crops,” he added.

Tanghin Dassouri’s experiment comes in the wake of government’s failure to meet the electricity needs of Burkina Faso.

Over the past 50 years, the National Electricity Company of Burkina Faso (the Société nationale d’électricité du Burkina, SONABEL) has only been able to provide power to 51 of the country’s 400 towns. As a result, 88 percent of the 12 million-strong population does not have access to electricity, according to SONABEL’s own statistics.

“Equipment and infrastructure are so expensive that the government can no longer guarantee everyone electricity according to the original plan,” Emmanuel Nonyarma, the General Manager for Electricity at the Ministry of Mines and Energy told IPS, adding “If we go on this way, we will go bankrupt and be forced to cut power here and there in order to pay for production costs.”

Now, the public has been drawn into financing the initiatives that will finally bring power to towns and villages.

Co-operatives such as the one in Tanghin Dassouri will be allowed to charge customers rates that are slightly higher than those demanded by SONABEL, so as to make a small profit. Both communities and government will be given a say when this price is set, while money from the project will pay for training employees to manage the grid.

“We have to…entrust development sectors, like electricity, to communities who will manage them by becoming partners with the government,” Nonyarma notes. “We’re really banking on the hope that communities will take on this responsibility.”

He adds that co-operatives are going to have to insure that customers pay their bills so that these groups can, in their turn, meet obligations to SONABEL. The leaders of cooperatives say that awareness campaigns about the benefits that electrification brings to communities should make bill collection easier.

SONABEL is also charging customers in the country’s two main cities more, to help subsidise electricity users in other parts of Burkina Faso. The cities, Ouagadougou and Bobo Dioulasso, are where the greatest number of SONABEL customers is located; these people account for up to 85 percent of national power usage.

This policy will allow people in Tanghin Dassouri and other localities to get connected to the electricity grid for about 55 dollars, payable over a five-year period. The average cost of an unsubsidized connection is about 389 US dollars.

In order to assist with the electrification of villages, the Danish Agency for Cooperation has provided the Burkinabé government with about 11 million dollars in aid this year. Authorities are also expecting financial support from the World Bank and the African Development Bank, amongst others.

Sixty percent of the funds lent to cooperatives will take the form of subsidies, while the remaining 40 percent are loans to be reimbursed with interest over a ten-year period. The reimbursed funds will be used to set up a fund that will finance electricity provision in other rural regions. Government has just named a director of this rural electrification fund who will compile an exhaustive inventory of the operation’s total cost.

For El Hadj Boureima Sawadogo, Tanghin Dassouri’s proximity to Ouagadougou is an incentive for businesses that wish to open offices in the town. And, he believes the electrification of Tanghin Dassouri will give these firms the final push they need to make the move: “As soon as we get electricity, many companies are going to relocate here and the money will then stay in the village.”

Others are equally excited. “I have a lot of plans which have never seen the light of day because there’s been no electricity here,” Mahamoudou Ouedraogo, a merchant, told IPS. “To charge the batteries which run our appliances, we have to spend 500 to 1,000 CFA francs (between about one and 1.8 dollars) to bring them to Ouagadougou,” he added.

With the new plan of having communities contribute to the cost of bringing electricity to their towns, Burkina Faso hopes to have 40 percent of the country electrified by 2015.

It is hoped that the economic spin-offs of electrification will enable the country meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people who live on than less than a dollar a day by 2015. (According to the National Institute of Statistics and Demography, 46.4 percent of Burkinabés currently live below this threshold.)

The MDGs were adopted in 2000 by the 191 member states of the United Nations, in a bid to improve the quality of life around the globe.