Research collaboration with KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Compared to other scientific fields, research on the topic of energy access in Sub Saharan Africa remains relatively limited and there are few comprehensive cooperations between energy access practitioners and academic institutions. Researchers often emphasise the lack of verified data from the sector as a missing ingredient.

The Access to Energy Institute and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm want to bridge that gap. The A2EI has started a cooperation with Francesco Fuso Nerini and Camilo Ramírez Gómez at KTH. Francesco works as associate professor at the KTH Division of Energy Systems, and is the director of the KTH Climate Action Centre, while Camilo is the lead researcher on Energy Access Modelling in the division.

The A2EI is putting a wide range of fully anonymised data of its open source data platform Prospect (http://prospect.energy) at the disposal of the research team headed by Francesco. The A2EI is facilitating access to aggregated and anonymised data between the researchers and the data owners through its Prospect platform.

The cooperation is starting with 2 master theses which will use the data to describe the effectiveness of results-based finance (RBF) programs in delivering energy access in line with SDG7. In addition, so-called energy-as-a-service models will be compared to RBF models to systematically derive their relative strengths and weaknesses.

By complementing the everyday experience of practitioners with scientific analysis based on verified, reliable data, we aim to contribute to new findings and learnings that will ultimately lead to faster, more sustainable electrification interventions.