Image: The Ifunda Health Center, located in the Iringa Region of Tanzania, is among the facilities included in the assessment.
By: Alexandra Wall, Associate Board Member, Green Empowerment
In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), 25,000 health facilities have no access to electricity and an estimated 70,000 facilities have access to electricity services but with frequent and long power outages. This is a staggering number and the implications are grave: in an already disadvantaged context, residents are faced with inadequate healthcare services often due to a lack of electricity. With poor or no electricity, critical healthcare equipment such as X-ray machines, oxygen concentrators, refrigerators, and autoclaves cannot function, baby deliveries are performed with flashlights or by the light of cellphones, and medical tools and equipment cannot be sanitized properly.
To help combat this electrification gap in SSA, small-scale renewable energy sources have provided an increasing number of health facilities with electricity access, but often fail to provide the sustainable and stable electricity needed to realize the promise of electrified healthcare provision.
In October 2022, the Health Electrification and Telecommunications Alliance (HETA) formally launched to improve energy access and health service delivery for African health facilities and their communities. HETA is a USAID Global Development Alliance and Power Africa’s flagship initiative created to specifically address health facility electrification and digital connectivity challenges on the continent. HETA aims to support 10,000 facilities across SSA with new or improved access to reliable electricity and digital connectivity—powered by renewables.
Green Empowerment and HETA are collaborating to improve healthcare through sustainable energy solutions
Earlier this year, Green Empowerment received a HETA grant to conduct energy and digital connectivity assessments using the Decision Response Energy Assessment Management (DREAM) tool at 100 health facilities in five regions of Tanzania. Of these 100 health facilities, 73 are served by the national grid and 27 are off-grid yet electrified to some extent, primarily by standalone solar systems. The composition of health facilities that will be assessed in this project are equally diverse and include the following: 44 dispensaries, 40 health centers, eight district hospitals, seven designated district hospitals, and one voluntary agency hospital.
This grant provides the invaluable opportunity for Green Empowerment to customize the DREAM tool in Tanzania and to scale the tool to other geographic areas.
What is the DREAM Tool?
DREAM, a remotely administered energy needs assessment tool, uses detailed information that facility medical staff input via an app on their phones. This tool aims to understand gaps in electricity access at each facility, help establish the total investment cost to electrify and replace diesel generators (if present), prioritize health facilities to receive funding and investments, and help assist in the first stages of design on each energy system.
For HETA, the DREAM tool will create profiles of energy needs for 100 clinics but also develop essential load profiles for health facilities in Tanzania according to their tier level. Data from these clinics, spread across five regions, will be extrapolated across other similar health facilities in Tanzania, which will help inform future HETA-funded health electrification projects and financing models in the country. This assessment will help create standard profiles of the energy and digital connectivity requirements for different types of health facilities in Tanzania’s health sector, with the ultimate aim of supporting HETA’s long-term planning and strategy design.
Stay tuned for final results from this project, lessons learned, and recommendations for replication or scaling in other HETA countries.
Alexandra Wall is passionate about ensuring access to reliable and affordable electricity for residents, businesses, and social infrastructure in low-resourced areas of the world. As nLine’s Global Energy Projects Manager, she helps lead planning and implementation of electricity monitoring projects in sub-Saharan Africa. Alexandra holds a Master of Development Practice (MDP) from UC Berkeley and a BA in Economics and International Studies from UW-Madison.