Solar panels for sale near Nyeri, Kenya, in 2024. (Photo by James Wakibia)

When Rose Mutiso was growing up in Nairobi in the 1990s, her family kept candles and paraffin lamps at the ready. Power outages were common. Without electricity, her family couldn’t watch TV or do much of anything; there was a lot of sitting in the dark. She felt like she was living in a disaster zone.

But by the time Mutiso was in high school in the 2000s, this was no longer a worry. Blackouts were rare. She could take it for granted that she would be able to study after dinner.

“It’s completely night and day from how it was when we were younger,” Mutiso tells me in an interview. She is now the research director for the Energy for Growth Hub, an energy think tank.

The speed of this change was impressive indeed. It’s part of a larger shift that has transformed Kenya, especially urban Kenya, over the last few decades. Electricity access soared from 37% in 2013 to 79% in 2023, according to the latest Kenyan energy policy review prepared by the International Energy Agency and the Kenyan government. (The IEA has defined electricity access as being able to power at least a handful of basic devices.)

This progress has extended to informal settlements, the unplanned areas where the lowest-income urbanites live. In May 2014, the national utility company, Kenya Power, took a community-based approach to triple the number of slum households connected to electricity. Access remains unequal, but now almost everybody living in an informal settlement has access to an electricity connection, raising the overall urban access rate to nearly 100%. It’s a remarkable shift from as recent as 2010, when urban homes were even less connected to electricity than rural ones on average, largely because of the lacking provision in informal settlements.

Progress is pushing forward. The Kenyan government is aiming to reach 100% electricity access by 2030 and 100% renewable electricity generation by 2035. Climate leadership has applauded the latter goal. However, the next push may be the hardest one yet.

The world definitely needs a win on energy. There’s been plenty of disturbing news lately about energy belligerence and blackouts, for instance.

Globally, we have an ambitious energy objective in the Sustainable Development Goals, called SDG7. Among other things, this SDG seeks to ensure universal access to energy and to double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency by 2030.

Progress has been uneven. While the gap between rural and urban electrification has narrowed worldwide,

© Forbes