Household surveys
Structured data collection sampled to support statements about a population rather than anecdotes about a site, covering service levels, expenditure and coping behaviour.
Energy Access and Transitions
Powering Africa's Economic Growth
Research on how households and enterprises actually get energy, what it costs them, and which financing and policy arrangements move a transition from ambition to delivery.
Why this matters
Energy is the input on which industrialisation, health services and modern livelihoods depend. Across much of Africa it is neither reliable nor clean.
Sustainable Development Goal 7 aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services for all by 2030. In Africa, 900 million people still lack access to clean cooking solutions and about 600 million do not have access to reliable electricity. Concurrently, the 2026 UN SDG 6 Synthesis Report highlights that global water-use efficiency across energy and economic sectors grew by 19.5% between 2015 and 2022, underscoring the deep link between water management and sustainable energy systems.
Cooking is the part of the problem most often treated as a household matter rather than a development priority, and it carries the heaviest health burden. Incomplete combustion of solid biomass in traditional stoves drives indoor air pollution, which is a leading cause of premature death in several of the countries where we work.
The transition will not be a single leap to modern fuels. Improved biomass solutions are an interim step that large numbers of households will occupy for years, which makes a multi-fuel framing more useful than a binary one — a point our published work on Sierra Leone’s clean cooking strategy develops in detail.
Capital is the other constraint. Whether a mini-grid, a cooking enterprise or a geothermal project reaches financial close depends on how risk is priced and which instruments are available, so our energy research runs from household demand through to the structure of the finance behind supply.
900m
Without clean cooking in Africa (SDG 7)
600m
Without reliable electricity in Africa (SDG 7)
+19.5%
Global water-use efficiency gain in economic sectors (SDG 6.4)
What we work on
Five competencies within this thematic area.
01
Systems Modeling, Digitalization & Foresight
Scenario modelling and digital tools for planning generation, networks and demand under uncertainty.
02
Market Design, Regulation & Utility Reform
Tariffs, market structure, licensing and the utility reforms that determine whether the sector is financially viable.
03
Energy Finance, Risk & Asset Management
How projects are appraised, financed and de-risked, and how assets are managed across their operating life.
04
Critical Minerals Supply Chains & Circularity
The minerals underpinning the transition, and the circularity and value-addition opportunities along their chains.
05
Just Transition Governance & Socio-Economic Policy
The distributional consequences of transition — employment, livelihoods and the governance needed to manage them.
How we work
Our energy work combines household evidence, market assessment and financial analysis.
Mixed-methods evaluation
Quantitative measurement paired with interviews and focus groups, so a result arrives with an explanation of the mechanism behind it.
Policy and regulatory analysis
Reading strategies, standards and regulations against one another to locate the contradictions, gaps and unfunded mandates that stall implementation.
Market and sector assessment
State-of-the-market analysis covering supply chains, distributors, pricing and the regulatory conditions that determine whether a technology can reach scale.
Energy finance analysis
Appraisal of instruments, capital flows and investment structures, including methodologies for evaluating the sustainability of an investment rather than its return alone.
Technology and performance assessment
Technical evaluation of stoves, systems and installations against the conditions of actual use, which frequently diverge from laboratory or datasheet conditions.
Work with us on energy
We partner with governments, funders, investors and enterprises on research that informs strategy and unlocks finance.