​International donor support for rural development (including electrification) in the global South is often implemented in close partnership with national governments.  However, increasingly national governments are the cause of dire conflict situations, involving human rights abuses, mass casualties, and socio-economic fallout from constant violence and lack of safety of civilians.  

IMPORTANCE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
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International development partners can better integrate political economy analyses into the design of their programs.  For example, in the case of Myanmar prior to the 2021 coup the country had faced government takeover by the national military thrice since its national independence from the British in 1948.  While the closely monitored 2015 elections were democratic, the NLD government’s victory was a pseudo-democracy since the advantages granted by the country’s constitution to the Myanmar military dictatorship had not changed with the election.

​In spite of the obvious history of national military rule and its restraint on the civilian government, many international multilateral financiers and bi-lateral donors that entered the country after 2013 chose the fledgling national government as their primary client.  The repercussions of this decision are the missed opportunities to strategically use development initiatives as a tool to empower civilians and weaken the junta. Had the country’s political economy been accounted for by international development partners, a looming coup would have been anticipated, and the primary recipients of international support would have been local and non-government actors.  However, doing so would have required international partners to revamp their approaches to build trust with local practitioners.

The situation is similar in Cameroon and Ethiopia, where the conflicts are also rooted within national governments.   When governments begin to commit human rights violations, their international development partners can only simply cut ties with the government, having no institutional leverage to negotiate on behalf of ethnic and marginalized civilians.  However, hindsight analyses can help donors integrate the realities of local and national political economy into future scoping missions and program designs.

RESILIENCE OF LOCAL AND NON-GOVERNMENT STAKEHOLDERS

​As the need for rural development has become greater with the pandemic and the humanitarian situations, international donors now seek non-government partners to deploy aid and support in countries of conflict.  However, such a noble approach comes too late -- local non-government actors are forced to focus on maintaining basic safety (ironically from violence caused by the same national governments that were supported by international donors) and economic stability.  

Yet local civil society organizations (CSOs) and local private enterprises continue to be resilient in the face of the conflict.  In Myanmar local CSOs have pooled together to provide aid to ethnic regions destroyed by the national military, micro hydro communities continue to build climate and economic resilience in a devastated economy, and local private sector actors have forged ahead with their promises to electrify communities. In Cameroon and Ethiopia government censorship has prevented access to understanding the plight of impacted rural communities, but it is clear that activists living in the conflict regions are frontline changemakers.

While it will be difficult for international aid to support the frontline during conflict, it is still valuable to conduct a hindsight analysis on what alternatives to government partnerships could have been more strategic from a political economy perspective.  From the energy access and local practitioner aspects of rural development, we offer the following hindsight.

MITIGATING INTERNAL BIASES
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The staff and consultants of international development organizations come with their own biases, based on their professional journeys.  The biases prevent them from fully understanding the political economy aspects of energy access.  For example, they may be more open to a practitioner that is an English-versed extrovert with less experience and not from the local region, than an English-challenged introvert who has an extensive track record and is based locally.  They may chastise the crude appearance of locally developed technology without understanding the constraints it was built under nor the value of the local social capital that resulted.  The presence of such biases during the scoping of a mission and during every engagement between international and local, non-government stakeholders impedes trust-building.  The biases can be countered by acknowledging them and taking support from bridge-building facilitators who can strategize around the strengths, weaknesses, and incentives of the differing international donor, government, and non-government contexts.

TWO-WAY, RESULTS BASED CAPACITY BUILDING 

Local capacity building is a vital aspect of any development initiative to sustain itself post-implementation.  However, often the approach used by international development partners are not results-based, outcome-oriented, nor linked to implementation.  At times the specific need for knowledge building is not addressed because the international development partner has not taken initiative, effort, and/or lacks skill to understand the local context, and relies only on what its consultants can offer.  Trainers fly in for some days without having ample time to build understanding prior to the training event and follow up after.  Participant selection does not prioritize local practitioners; and when it does the targeted actors do not want to attend due to lack of trust and assurance of the training meeting their needs.  

Such pitfalls can be addressed with two-way learning between international and local stakeholders, where capacity building includes international actors learning from local practitioners.  In this way local knowledge is valued as much as international knowhow, i.e. local trainers are paid as much as international trainers.  Valuing local expertise is a robust and efficient way to build trust with local stakeholders, which also helps to develop customized, impact-based interventions. Scaled micro hydro contexts embraced two-way learning.  For example, Swiss trainers in Nepal in the early 1990s designed technical capacity building after understanding existing manufacturing skills and facilities, EnDev Indonesia’s management spent weeks in the field to understand the existing situation before iterating their program, and HPNET’s work in Myanmar started with a scoping mission led by local organizations involving foreign partners, and created space for two-way learning with international development organizations.

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND?
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As international development partners exit conflict stricken countries, the media’s attention fades, and funding priorities shift, the dire situations on the ground continue to worsen.  The progress of taxpayer-funded, international development interventions is unraveled.  Some donors stay on but must abide by the oppressive regimes’ rules, including not spotlighting the humanitarian crises and not holding the regime responsible.  While addressing post-conflict downstream impact (e.g. refugee crises) is critical, more must be done to integrate political economy analyses and the strengthening of local, non-government entities in development and aid interventions. 

Less than 17% of the Cameroon rural population has access to electricity. For the government to achieve its objective of rural electrification, the production, transmission, distribution and supply of power needs to bring onboard private small scale producers who can produce and sell the energy to the national grid at least at production cost. This will gradually lead to a smart grid system. At the moment, Cameroon is facing an extreme energy shortage and it has put many remote areas into darkness. The present demand for energy has gone far above the production capacity  Like in metropolitan areas, new settlement areas are coming up every day and due to the many bottlenecks to get domestic grid subscription, and some people fall into illegal connections  (“branchements anarchiques”) and falsifying the subscribers’ inventory of the national grid line. Many step down transformers are overloaded giving way to voltage fluctuations.

Cameroon has a unique position within the CEMAC region, an Economic Commission of Central African states, whose principal objective is regional integration for economic growth. Cameroon is also the third country in Africa with the highest hydro potential (after the DRC and Ethiopia) with approximately 23,000 megawatts of exploitable hydro power. At present Cameroon has exploited just approximately 3%. For Cameroon to take an economic advantage of this position, there is a need to strengthen its energy sector to power its industries which inevitably is the locomotive of development.
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We are glad to have HPNET Member Mr. Atud Jonathan Asaah from Cameroon, as a guest blogger to share his views on the potential and impact of hydro mini-grids in his country.

Africa harbors one of the world’s best renewable energy resources which can be used to harness electricity. Unfortunately, in 2012 the International Energy Agency announced that about 590 million people in Africa live without access to electricity. Meanwhile, a similar report in the same year quoted that there were 1.5 billion people around the world that don’t have access to electricity.

From the two reports cited above, it can be seen that Africa alone had approximately 40% of those living in darkness in the world. Even though this report is 7 years old, there may be little change as regards the proportion of Africans living in the dark today because in most of these African countries, the grid extension program has been very slow. ​

This low rate of rural electrification (17%)is due to a series of factors:

• Cameroon has a population of above 24 million people and 45% of these people live in rural areas. These rural areas are organized in small villages mostly located in geographically difficult topography that makes it very expensive for grid extension in terms of distribution infrastructures. In most cases, the terminus of the grid line maybe too far from the village.
• The initial demand in most of these villages is usually very small and the national grid company may find it not cost effective.

On the other hand, these villages are naturally endowed with unlimited renewable energy resources on the spot which include abundant rivers, streams, wind and the sun that could constitute reliable sources of electricity for these remote communities. Law N ° 2011/022 of 14 December 2011 of Cameroon governing the electricity sector in its Article 29 provides for conditions to own private power production units but there is still a very timid entry of private investors in the energy sector, which therefore calls for more awareness from government to lure these partners into synergy to meet up with the demand.
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Cameroon is found within CEMAC-The Economic community of Central African states and the most populated country and acting as the economic hub of this block. Its energy sector remains a major prerequisite to meet up its economic giant position within this economic block which is considered a regional integration used as a tool for economic growth. The government cannot achieve this energy objective alone via its current  grid extension program.

WAY FORWARD

Most of the villages of these rural areas have been naturally endowed with renewable energy resources like the sun, wind and small streams which can be used to harness their energy on the spot.  The more stakeholders fold their arms and see this poor population continue to live in the dark, the more villagers rely heavily on biomass -- cutting down trees in the forest to collect wood and produce charcoal for cooking and heating, kerosene lamps used to provide lighting, petrol and diesel will be used to power standby generators.

We cannot sit and watch these practices when at the same time we intend to mitigate the green gas effect which is causing global warming (climate change mitigation). Renewable energy using indigenous resources like those listed above can play a catalyst role in this energy revolution. Reference is made  here to small-scale hydroelectricity systems, solar systems, and wind power. This will lead to bringing the sources of energy back to the community level- a participatory approach to energy generation which gives local communities greater autonomy over the infrastructure.

Many of the people who lack access to electricity in Cameroon live in these villages with sufficient sunshine, abundant streams and rivers that flow throughout the year and in most cases have hills that provide the necessary gravity to rotate a micro hydro turbine.

Creation of community micro hydro power stations

These are micro power stations that have maximum capacity of up to 100 kW and are easily managed by the community. Those communities, which are isolated or found far off the national grid, can be powered by these independent power units which involve harnessing small water sources usually in hills that are flowing under the natural influence of gravity with minimum civil construction infrastructure. The water is tunneled through a pipeline (penstock) to rotate a turbine connected to a generator to produce electricity. The penstock builds up pressure from the water that has traveled downwards from a hill. The electricity is then sent to the village community for household consumption or sold to the national grid. The construction of a community micro hydro project requires community mobilization especially at the civil phase. The local community needs to be well aware on the importance of the scheme​.

Community battery charging units

These are small hydro power plants of few watts up to 5 kW which can be used to charge DC batteries at the community level. These batteries are later used with inverters to obtain AC current which is used to power domestic appliances.

Community-based micro hydro repair workshops

The main difficulty encountered in most cases in running micro hydro systems is the lack of a ready supply of affordable turbine parts and the lack of domestic manufacturing capacity.  The presence of local technical workshops that can fabricate simple components needed to run the system is vital for the sustainability of the project. Most of the remote micro hydro systems in Africa have been closed down because of lack of spare parts for its components.  Lack of local fabrication workshops poses a great challenge for rural electrification.​

​Africa is losing more forest than any continent and making it more vulnerable to climate change. This seems to be the right moment for policy makers to intervene via promotion of these community-base micro hydro schemes -- which will not only protect our forests but equally improve on the livelihood of these rural population.​