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Paper short abstract:

Off grid solar PV has become a new site of electricity capital, transformed into a cash flow, a financial asset and a conduit for consumer debt. I analyse relationships between key actors and institutions involved e.g mobile banking platforms, ‘next generation utilities’ and mobile network operators

Paper long abstract:

While the last decade has seen the rapid growth and deployment of off-grid solar, ten per cent of the world’s population, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa, still lack access to electricity. Meanwhile, off-grid solar home systems using pay as you go (PAYGO) mobile money have been proposed as a key solution to meeting the target of universal access to energy under Sustainable Development Goal 7 at the same time as realising further virtues of financial and digital inclusion. With this context in mind, I explore how through PAYGO, off-grid solar electricity in sub-Saharan Africa is being transformed into a cash flow, a financial asset and a conduit for consumer debt (Baker 2023). In so doing I analyse evolving relationships between the key actors and institutions involved in this process, including mobile banking platforms such as M-Pesa, ‘next generation utilities’ such as M-KOPA and BBOXX, and powerful mobile network operators such as Safaricom and MTN.

Theoretically I conceptualise energy access as a new frontier of ‘electricity capital’, drawing from a field of analysis that is firstly concerned with the reconfiguration of relationships between technological innovations in the electricity sector, and different institutions of the state, industry, finance, and users (Luke and Huber 2022); and secondly, how the structures and processes of finance and investment have influenced trajectories of technological innovation (Harrison 2022). This concept builds on work which conceptualises energy as a social relation that is intrinsically bound up with political, economic and social forces and historical processes (e.g Lohmann 2020).