The Powerlessness Of Nigeria's Tech Startups

A United Nations report this fall found that 840 million people live without access to reliable electricity. Most of them are in Africa, and most live in rural areas, beyond the reach of the grid. A new post in NPR's Goats and Soda blog, discusses these regular power shortages in many low- and middle-income countries.

Jonathan Phillips, director of the Energy Access Project at Duke University, says Nigeria's power problems date back decades to the country's early days of independence, when the government set up a heavily subsidized electrical grid. The energy system was often a prime target for corruption, he says, and has never been able to generate enough profit to offset the massive cost needed to build enough new power plants and distribution lines to keep up with the country's rapidly growing population. As a result, he says, Nigeria has one-fifth the total power supply of North Carolina, with a population of 200 million people, 20 times the state's — and blows through up to $8 billion per year on diesel fuel for generators.

"Nigeria is the poster child on how power access, especially in the business area, is just such a mega-constraint to growth," he says. Especially for startups, he says, "they've got 99 problems and they just don't need electricity to be one of them."