Powering Through The Pandemic

Covid-19 has proved to be a game-changer for East African businesses. Among the hardest hit is the region’s alternative energy sector. Responsible for providing many remote communities with off-grid energy services, sector businesses started the year on a high. FORBES AFRICA examines how they are responding, and coping, in the current crisis.

- Marie Shabaya

Over the last decade, East Africa’s off-grid energy companies have been the unsung heroes of the region’s wider energy industry. According to GOGLA, the global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, these businesses have collectively provided at least 470 million people across the region and beyond, many of them in remote communities and cut off from the national grid, with alternative energy access.

The industry, working to reduce energy poverty across East Africa, was arguably on a high at the start of 2020 but the onset of Covid-19, and the reactionary public policies that followed, have worked to reverse a lot of growth that the sector was previously experiencing.

Looking at the off-grid solar sector, GOGLA’s East Africa representative, Patrick Tonui, says that while the impact of the pandemic has been grave for the industry, Covid-19 remains a universal shock for the region and sector businesses have had to react with that in mind.

“Coming into the beginning of this year, this industry was really on a solid growth path and the outlook was looking good. [In] January, we began to hear about Covid-19 and what was happening [especially after] China shut down for the month. We [anticipated that] there were going to be impacts on the supply chain and on the manufacturers who were producing these products. As we went into March, when Covid-19 reached Africa, and we saw various government responses to it, one thing that was abundantly clear was that we [were] going through a global health crisis and it wasn’t necessarily about us [as an industry],” he says.