Quality of service in the electricity sector, a benchmarking study on Eastern Africa Power Pool

Electricity losses are among the key indicator of the low quality of service in the electricity sector, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has also the low access rate to electricity. African regional organizations engaged in a process of power pooling and cross-border trade through the transmission interconnections. Eastern Africa Power Pool is one of the power pools established from the 1990’s. This paper attempts to compare the performance of six EAPP country members, based on their electricity distribution. We used Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method to compare the technical efficiency scores and the Malmquist indexes to estimate how the different countries improved their performance. We used one input and two outputs, form the period from 2009 to 2017. The partial productivity shows that electricity losses are very high in the region, ranging from 18 to 25 percent on average. Technical efficiency scores show that electricity distribution utilities in 5 out of 6 countries are moderately efficient under variable return to scale, and 4 countries under constant return to scale. However, only two countries improved the performances during the period of study. The study shows that a country can be inefficient on the basis of a static analysis, while improving efficiency and technical change in the case of dynamic analysis, and vice versa.