Our CESET partners’ Dr Josh Kirshner and Lorraine Howe + their colleagues have just published a new open access article in Energy Research and Social Science Journal. 

"Electricity access in Mozambique: A critical policy analysis of investment, service reliability and social sustainability" argues that despite Mozambique being a resource-rich energy hub, rural community access to electricity remains low, and urban centres suffer poor service quality. Aging transmission infrastructure, consumer growth, erratic generation, and extreme weather events exacerbate power cuts and oscillations that disrupt household activities and damage appliances.

Through qualitative critical policy analysis and interviews with public and private sector stakeholders in the four largest cities of Mozambique they assess diverse perspectives on reliability, affordability, and investment/revenue-raising to meet SDG7 to provide clean, modern energy services for all. The authors find that although electricity tariffs commonly exceed household budgets, they remain politicised and not cost-reflective – putting the national utility Electricidade de Moçambique E.P. (EDM) into growing debt and imminent insolvency, hindering its ability to ensure reliable, quality and affordable services.

They recommend unbundling the electricity sector to enable EDM and the energy regulator ARENE to be managed independently, and reduce state-induced inefficiencies that limit ability to make transparent and fair decisions on tariffs, institutional capacity and performance, and the development of the power sector.