Fairer Power Needn’t Cost Much More

By Özlem Karsu, Ayse Selin Kocaman and Philipp Trotter

Ask an energy planner why so many people in sub-Saharan Africa still live without electricity and the answer often comes back to cost. Reaching remote, thinly populated areas is expensive, so the conventional approach extends the system wherever each new connection is cheapest. The difficulty is that the cheapest plan is rarely a fair one. It clusters new access in a few favourable regions and can leave others in the dark. Worldwide, more than 770 million people still lack electricity, three quarters of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and rural access across the region averages just 30% against more than 80% in cities. Over 55,000 rural health facilities operate without adequate power. So planners face an uncomfortable question: how much extra would it actually cost to spread access more evenly?

The price of fairness depends strongly on context

The short answer is that it depends heavily on where you are, but for most of the journey the premium is actually relatively modest. This is the result of a new open access study co-produced by researchers at Bilkent University in Turkey, Carnegie Mellon University in the US, Imperial College London and AISESA which was just published in the renowned Applied Energy journal. The study embeds the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, directly into the planning model and compares conventional least-cost plans with equality-enhancing electrification plans for different African countries. While the model had to make some broad cost and demand assumptions, is well-placed to compare different plans within a given country. And these comparative findings are striking: The study finds that a 70% access target, moving from the cheapest plan to the most equal one (i.e. one where the Gini coefficient is 0) adds only about 5% to total system cost in Niger, or about 11% in Benin or 16% in Malawi. However, in Zimbabwe for instance, the cost increase of higher equality is far steeper because once expansion has to reach the most remote and costly-to-serve areas, further equality gains become expensive quickly. Geography, existing infrastructure and the cost of supply, not fairness in the abstract, decide how steep the trade-off is. Unit costs differ too: Ethiopia reaches under 4 cents per kWh, helped by abundant low-cost hydropower, while Malawi runs as high as 12 cents.

The extra system cost of a more equal electrification plan at a 70% access target. Moving rightwards means greater equality. The premium is modest in Niger but rises steeply in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Figure from Akbas et al. (2026).

Who gets left behind

The distributional stakes are real. In Benin at a 70% target, the worse-off 48% of the population accounts for 37% of total access under the equality-enhancing plan, but only 26% under the least-cost plan. Least-cost planning concentrates new connections in a few regions, leaving parts of the north and centre with very low access, whereas the equality-enhancing plan spreads it more evenly. Solar generation is key for delivering these balanced outcomes. Inequality also peaks at middle levels of a country’s electrification journey. At very low rates, everyone is more or less equally deprived, and near full coverage almost everyone is served, so the hardest fairness problems arise in between, which is exactly where many African countries sit today.

What this means for policy

The central message is that fairer electrification is affordable far more often than least-cost planning implies, so equity belongs in the plan from the start rather than as an afterthought. The model is best used as a decision-support tool for participatory planning, helping governments, utilities and communities see the cost of each fairness target and choose deliberately. The study’s own evidence shows the stakes. Ghana lifted rural access from 3% in 1993 to 50% in 2013 and 78% by 2023, sharply narrowing the rural-urban gap, through a national scheme that prioritised rural communities and required local commitment before support was released. Uganda, by contrast, moved rural access only from 3% to around 10% over two decades. Fair expansion depends on adequate public financing, broad territorial coverage and institutions that resist politically selective allocation. With the right conditions, electrification approaches focusing on equity of access are often far more feasible than what is often assumed, especially with the falling costs of solar energy.