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# Conclusions

It is worth highlighting the limitations of this study—in scope and data availability—before summarizing the key findings and possible policy implications:

- With respect to household access, there is much less information on the supply side compared to the demand side. Connection charges tend to increase rapidly with increasing distance from the power line, and yet information on the distance between each household and the nearest distribution line is not available. Grid connection may not be a practical option even for many living in electrified communities.

- Information on income, let alone disposable cash income, is not available and is substituted by household expenditures used to calculate official poverty statistics. Those using kerosene for lighting have some cash‐based expenditures to redirect to electricity purchase, but no survey separates spending on kerosene for lighting from that for cooking. Trying to pinpoint determinants of access beyond affordability based on national household expenditure surveys requires more data collection and analysis in individual countries.

- It would not be appropriate to extrapolate the conclusions and recommendations in this paper to off‐ grid electricity where different factors will be at play. There are many areas in Africa—areas with low population density and low household expenditures, and far from cities and towns—where it would be too costly to supply grid electricity. Where the unit cost of grid electricity supply markedly exceeds what would be considered reasonable to pay for grid electricity, off‐grid solutions are likely to offer more practical solutions.

This paper confirms many widely accepted observations, such as that the percentage of population using electricity remains low in Africa, that electricity use is far more prevalent in urban than in rural areas, and that adoption of electricity and quantities consumed rise sharply with income. There are also relatively new findings. The rate of household access to grid electricity is only weakly correlated with affordability of tariffs applicable to the subsistence level of electricity consumption. There is little evidence of a trade‐off between utilities’ deficits and household access, but there is evidence of trade‐offs between affordability at relatively high residential consumption levels and underpricing. There is no marked difference between female‐ and male‐headed households with respect to access to electricity and spending on electricity, once income (per capita as well as household, captured through the combination of per capita expenditures and household size) and the place of residence are accounted for. The remainder of this section is largely about grid electricity.

The findings of this study suggest several measures that can enable use of electricity by more households:

- Avoid multiple connections. They substantially reduce, if not eliminate altogether, the intended benefits of the subsidies provided by progressive tariffs. Shared connections also degrade the quality of service to those so connected because the combined demand of the households can easily exceed the installed capacity.

- Making connection charges affordable is one of the top priorities in a number of countries. The difference in the share of household expenditures needed to pay for the initial connection between those with and without grid connection is stark, with medians differing by a factor of two when total household expenditures are considered and a factor of three when only cash expenditures are considered. In some countries, connection charges are beyond the reach of low‐income households, arguably an important reason for multiple connections. Easing payment terms for new connection