From Screens to Grids: A Web Scrapping Analysis of Electricity Access in sub-Saharan Africa

In view of the lagging position of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) compared to other regional blocs in accessing electricity coupled with the wide disparity in rural-urban access to electricity, this study adopts the scrapping method to efficiently gather and analyse social discourse in real time. From the YouTube platform, this study examined 887 comments from January 2014 to July 2024. The result revealed that "ANC," "Africa," "south," "power," and "will" were the most frequently discussed topics in the discourse of electricity access. Also, more positive-tone comments were recorded than negative-tone remarks within the period. In terms of subjective polarity analysis, comments were positively inclined. The top ten topics that emerged were “ANC†, “Energy†, “People†, “Country†, “Government†, “Electricity†, “Eskom†, “Africa†, “Power†and “South†. The heatmap showed that there were a few topics with high correlation values. For cluster analysis, “South†, “Country†, “Eskom†, “Power†and “Energy†had positive sentiments and contents. On the contrary, “Government†, “Africa†and “People†were topics of negative sentiments and contents. Only “ANC†connected neutral sentiments and content. “ANC†, “Africa†and “country†had an 81.77% degree of centrality in the public digital discourse on access to electricity in SSA countries. This study has important ramifications for SSA, an energy-poor region towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7.