AfDB South Sudan pushes for adequate electricity supply initiative

By Charles Lotara
The African Development Bank (AfDB) Group is pushing the New Deal on Energy for Africa (NDEA), an initiative aims at supplying 200 million households in the continent with electricity, and South Sudan stands to benefit.
In an email to The City Review, AfDB South Sudan Country Manager Mr. Benedict Kanu said the aforementioned figure of people with access to electricity in the continent has to be realized five years from now.
“The 200 million figure is about the number of connections that have to be realized by the year 2025 to achieve universal access to electricity in Africa,” Kanu said adding this was a universal project that applies to the whole population without any selection criterion.
But AfDB is not using the go-it-alone approach. “The 200 million connections will be realized with funding from various sources such as multilateral/bilateral financial institutions as well as governments’ contributions,” Kanu wrote last week.
To that end, the South Sudan Minister of Finance and Planning Salvatore Garang confirmed to The City Review that the government was willing to contribute to the AfDB developmental plan to supply kinetic energy to citizens all over the country.
“We received their papers, we have them in our office and as the government of the Republic of South Sudan and the Ministry of Finance, in particular, we decide on how much we can contribute because this is a project that will benefit our people,” he said over the phone.
In January 2014, AfDB granted $26million to the South Sudan Electricity Corporation (SSEC) to rehabilitate and expand distribution networks within the capital Juba to provide reliable electricity supply from existing and future generation facilities and thus satisfy the suppressed load and demand growth in the city.
According to the National, Baseline Household Survey reveals that over 75% of the population in South Sudan still use firewood or charcoal for cooking, and less than 20% have access to grid electricity.
Ezra Company Limited is currently undertaking an electrification project which has three-quarters of residential areas within Juba and the project, which will supply 33 MW of electricity in its first phase is set to be completed in 2021.
But still, in most parts, there exists a low level of power generation coupled with inefficient distribution networks, which has resulted in supply constraints, occasionally forced blackouts and load shedding in Juba.
Consequently, most households and businesses have to rely on costly and unreliable captive power generation to satisfy their energy needs, a situation that has adversely affected the living standards of the population, and restrained business development.
AfDB established NDEA in 2015 and called for a substantial increase in investments to realize the Bank’s top five priority to “Light Up and Power Africa,” which aims to mobilize finance and expertise to expand access to reliable, sustainable energy for more than 200 million Africans through investments in power generation, inter-connections, transmission, and distribution.
Like other African countries, the bank says, the nationwide electrification effort is critical to unlocking South Sudan’s vast economic potential, enabling the growth of value-adding industries and services, and, most importantly, unleashing the ingenuity of the country’s 8 million people.
The proposed Bank support to the Juba Power Distribution System Rehabilitation and Expansion Project is in line with the South Sudan Development Plan and South Sudan Infrastructure Action Plan both identifying infrastructure as a core priority for South Sudan.