Effectiveness and efficiency in access to reliable electricity: The case of East African countries

Abstract

Improving access to reliable electricity has been recognized as a necessary condition to foster economic development and reduce poverty. This is therefore not a surprise to find such a goal in the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development of the United Nations. Taking this objective as our starting point, we present, in this paper, a non-parametric performance evaluation exercise of the East African electricity systems over a 10-year period. We focus our attention on two intertwined dimensions: effectiveness, i.e. reaching optimal outcomes, and efficiency, i.e. getting to optimal resource-outcome mixes. We show how these two dimensions can be measured over time, and how they can be compared and combined to construct useful indexes. In particular, we make a distinction between changes and shifts in the performances. The results show dramatic differences in terms of effectiveness and small differences in terms of efficiency. This reveals that to reach universal access to reliable electricity, as defined in the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, resource constraint is the key factor and not resource utilization.