News
Kenya has some of the largest urban poor areas on earth. In Nairobi alone, a city of 3.4 million, an estimated two million people live in informal settlements. Until recently, many areas of these settlements had to rely on poor-quality and unsafe electricity. People had to buy illegal connections from local cartels. Services and business activity were highly constrained, insecurity was rife, and electric fires and electrocutions were common.
This picture is now changing – rapidly.
Kenya Power and Lighting Corporation, the national utility, with support coming from the World Bank and ESMAP, is now overseeing a major scale up of electricity connections in urban poor settlements – a 30-fold increase in just one year. This success, however, has only come after the long struggles, the adoption of a community-centric approach based in part on the successful experience of other countries, and a firm commitment by the top management of the national utility.
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