Quality of service and access to electricity in Burundi and East Africa, a comparison of sector performance

Access to reliable, sustainable, modern and affordable energy services for all is one of the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development (SDG7). Despite the potential for renewable energy resources, more than 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remain without energy services. Its demand constitutes only 4% of global demand. Despite the merits of a vertically integrated monopoly, it has been criticized for being inefficient. Thus, a wave of reforms emerged in the 1990s, aiming, among other things, to vertically unbundle the different entities and introduce private sector participation. Burundi is one of the SSA countries for which access to electricity and quality of service are among the lowest in the world.
The thesis examines first the organization and performances of the electricity sector in Burundi. Through a descriptive analysis, it defines the legal and regulatory framework and analyzes performance in terms of access and quality of service. Lack of funding, excessive charges and governance problems at the national water and electricity utility are on the basis for poor performance and the barriers to private sector participation. To improve the quality of service by reducing one MWh of losses due to outages would require additional investments of US$ 223.7 per kVA of transformer installed capacity. Funding for these investments requires incentives for private sector participation, and joint projects within the framework of the East African Power Pool.
Secondly, since the extent to which power sector reforms were implemented varies from country to country, the identification of a required model for performance comparison is essential. Performance is compared using both a generation model and a transmission-distribution model for the case of six East African countries. On average, the performance gap for all countries is 19.6% and 23.5% for the generation and the transmission-distribution models respectively. On the other hand, the results show that countries that have restructured the power sector and attracted private investment tend to be the most technically efficient. Losses of electricity are a common and significant source of inefficiency in all countries. They have a negative impact on both users, utilities and the country. One of the goals of domestic energy policies is to mitigate them. The results show that, on average, it would be possible to reduce electricity losses by 8%, without changing the level of inputs and outputs, as well as the production technology. In this way, minimizing losses could generate enough resources to increase investments and improve the quality of service in the electricity sector.
Finally, this thesis relies on two databases compiled by the author that can be used for academic and managerial purposes. The first database is related to the electricity network in Burundi. It includes data on power outages related to load shedding and the losses they cause. It also includes data on transformers collected through a survey of the entire interconnected network in Burundi. The second database consists of aggregated power sector data from Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. It includes data on inputs and outputs collected through a survey conducted by the author in the various East African utilities.