38 In Mali, the monopoly distribution company reports the total number of low‐voltage (but not residential) customers in the survey year. The number of households reporting connection to the grid exceeds the number of low‐voltage customers by 30 percent. If all voltage customers are assumed to be residential— which they are not—and an average of two households are assumed to be connected to a shared meter, the percentage of households with their own unshared meter is calculated to be 54 percent. The percentage increases to 65 percent if the assumption is changed to three households for every shared meter on average.

Lastly, in Ethiopia, the monopoly distribution company reports the total number of residential customers in the year before the survey year. The number is 1.65 million customers in 2012, against 1.63 million households that reported having their own private meters out of a total of 4.2 million households reporting connection to the grid in 2013. These numbers strongly suggest that many households that replied that they had private meters were actually sharing their meters with their neighbors, with the distinction understood by survey respondents to be between having meters installed on their premises (private meters) versus connected to neighbors’ meters (shared meters). This in turn would mean that the percentage of households sharing meters was much greater in Ethiopia than the survey finding of 60 percent.

# Outages

Seven surveys—Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal—asked questions about power outages. Because questions asked varied from country to country, it is not possible to compare them on a common basis. The results are summarized in Table 14 for households connected to the grid who replied to the questions on the frequency, duration, or both of blackouts. Power outages were common in all the countries, and serious in Malawi (six out of every seven households reporting daily blackouts over the last 12 months), Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.

Table 14: Summary of power blackout information

|Country|Findings|Quintile dependence|Urban vs. rural|
|---|---|---|---|
|Ethiopia|27% of households replying<br>reported no blackouts during<br>the last 7 days, but 24%<br>reported more than 3<br>blackouts. The number of<br>hours without electricity over<br>the last 7 days translated to<br>1.8 hours a day.|Both measures (no blackouts,<br>more than 3 blackouts)<br>decreased with increasing<br>quintile. The numbers of<br>hours without electricity did<br>not vary much with quintile.|20% of urban and 38% of rural<br>households reported no<br>blackouts, while 22% of urban<br>and 28% of rural households<br>reported more than 3<br>blackouts. The number of<br>hours per day without<br>electricity translated to 1.6<br>hours in urban and 2.3 hours<br>in rural areas.|
|Madagascar|The number of hours per day<br>electricity was available<br>averaged 19. 68% of<br>households replying reported<br>24‐hour availability.|Excluding the bottom two<br>quintiles, which had too few<br>samples, the number of hours<br>electricity was available per<br>day increased with quintile<br>nationally.|The number of hours<br>electricity was available per<br>day averaged 20 in urban and<br>18 in rural areas. 70% of<br>urban and 64% of rural<br>households reported 24‐hour<br>availabilityof electricity.|
|Malawi|86% of households said they<br>had experienced blackouts<br>every day over the last 12<br>months.|The bottom 2 quintiles in<br>urban and the bottom 4<br>quintiles in rural areas had<br>too few sampled households<br>for meaningful statistics.<br>There was no consistent|89% of urban and 80% of rural<br>households reported daily<br>blackouts.|