Yeah, but you're missing the main point. We don't have electricity or water/sanitation grids in Africa because as they are constructed - usually with generation, transmission and distribution capex paid for with aid or a damn World Bank or AfDB loan - they quickly fall into disrepair. The simple reason is that operating and maintenance costs cannot be met (because the loan-pushers doing the planning were too optimistic), since in most cases the people paying for these utilities are too poor to afford their short-run marginal cost. If you don't believe me, check out the 2001 report of the World Health Organisation’s Macroeconomics and Health Commission (run by Jeffrey Sachs), which insisted that earlier state investments in water systems were wasted: ‘Between 1981 and 1990, more than US$134 billion was invested in efforts to expand water supply and sanitation services, approximately 34% of the sum coming from donors. Although some regions were able to make progress in improving access, few attained any of the goals set.’ Hence, concluded the WHO, ‘Not only is improved water and sanitation not particularly cost effective as a health measure, it is also high in total costs.’
The report failed to recognise that at the same time, the Bretton Woods Institutions were forcing dramatic cuts in operating subsidies on debtor countries, such that when impoverished water consumers could no longer maintain the systems - e.g., refilling diesel tanks to run boreholes, or replacing broken piping – then naturally, the capital investment was lost. The Sachs report researchers assessed water as ‘not particularly cost effective as a health measure’, and furthermore endorsed regulated water privatisation as ‘an important tool to ensure the delivery of expanded [privatised] services to the poor’. (A little later, in Arusha, I ran into the WHO clown who wrote those words and asked her why she hadn't mentioned the 1980s cuts in operating subsidies - and she admitted she hadn't even factored consumption subsidies in.)
> Africa is especially promising for brand new
> technologies, because it does not have the 'sunk cost'
> factor associated with old ones. You can invest in
> solar energy technology without making the old enegy
> production obsolete (since little or none exists,)
First, in many African contexts there's plenty of electricity but it's the vast enclave extractive economies that get it, instead of ordinary people. Second, we're not having good experiences with solar from the standpoint of the amperes required for cooking/heating; it's fine for a radio or a few light bulbs but to get the really important energy into a house that can replace a wood or coal stove, grid electricity is still a necessity.
> If you subsidize
> consumption, you will not get very far, I am afraid.
>
Well it's necessary but insufficient. Without dramatically improved
effective demand through a restructured pricing system that breaks from
neoliberal orthodoxy, we won't get investment.