Shared Power, Shared Benefits? Reviewing private sector collaborations with community actors in Sub-Saharan Africa's mini grid sector

Mini grids are widely recognised as the most promising pathway to solving energy access issues for up to 380 million people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and consequently to achieving SDG 7. Due to a diversity of economic, regulatory, and socio-cultural challenges, however, the sector faces an inevitable trade-off between economic viability and energy justice. Partnerships between communities and implementing actors such as the private sector are central to overcoming these challenges. This review analyses the evidence on community renewable energy (CRE) solutions to answer three questions: What constitutes an energy community in SSA? Is community ownership a key success factor for community energy in SSA? And lastly, what constitutes meaningful and effective participation? By contrasting the widely applied but Western-centric definition of CRE with a comprehensive literature review of SSA mini grid case studies, we find that most sustainable energy projects are not community-owned. Instead, private-sector for-profit and non-profit models are the norm. The evidence shows that each has distinct strengths and challenges, though for-profit models outperform other options in relation to economic and technical sustainability. We discuss misconceptions about the concept of ‘participation’ and outline multiple participatory avenues for CRE in SSA. Lastly, we propose a novel framework of community participation specifically tailored to off-grid energy contexts in the Global South, which enables an assessment of areas of disagreement and synergy amongst multiple actors. Fostering context-sensitive partnerships between communities and implementing actors can help to tackle the challenges faced by the mini grid sector, and thus contribute to reducing the energy access gap.