The SEN-Africa team is finalizing plans for the first workshop aimed at revealing trade-offs in electricity access objectives between different stakeholder groups.
August 12, 2019 By Destenie Nock
Today the Sustainable Electricity-access Network for Africa (SEN-Africa) had its first in-person meeting in Accra, at the University of Ghana. Over the next week the team is bringing different stakeholders groups together to discuss electricity access challenges and opportunities within the Ghanaian electricity sector. The goal of this stakeholder workshop is to better understand trade-offs stakeholders will make in terms of electricity access objectives.
During the workshop the Energy Ministry, Electricity Corporation of Ghana (ECG), Millennium Development Account (MiDA), Ghana grid Company (GridCo), Public Utility Regulation Commission (PURC), Association of Ghana Industries, and other representatives from the generation, transmission, distribution, and academic sectors, as well as the community are expected to be in attendance. This is the first meeting of it's kind, and the team is excited to have such a positive response from the stakeholder groups.
The results of the workshop are expected to lead to greater collaborations on electricity access research between the academic research community and the private, non-profit and governmental sectors. By incorporating a greater understanding of stakeholder trade-offs into the power system planning the work of the SEN-Africa team will directly address the "accounting for equity" issue, which I mentioned in a previous post. By incorporating the equity issue in the electricity planning framework we can have a better idea about how to create a socially sustainable power system. Looking forward to sharing more of the work from the SEN-Africa Team in the coming days.
Update: 25 stakeholders came to the workshop to discuss electricity trade-offs. Check out the blog post "Electricity access discussions and Stakeholder Workshops" to read more about the first workshop hosted in Accra. For the Tamale workshop please visit "An extension of Voices: 2nd SEN-Africa Workshop hosted in Northern Ghana".
Note: The SEN-Africa Team is made up of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Ghana, University of Nairobi, University of Cape Town, and Argonne National Lab. For more information about the team please visit http://sen-africa.org/
This work is made possible by a grant from the Worldwide Universities Network.