Work
Case studies
Public work from Stahili, CrossBoundary and Springhead Data. Each piece is built from published findings or open data, and the charts are live: hover, filter and explore.
Keeping the lights on: what 4,511 Kenyan small businesses told us about power cuts
A national survey with Boston Consulting Group on how unreliable grid power hits Kenya's micro, small and medium businesses: who stops trading, who stops investing, and what they'd pay to fix it.
- SME owners surveyed
- 4,511
- SME owners surveyed
- say outages cut or stop trading
- 79%
- say outages cut or stop trading
- would pay more for reliable power
- 74%
- would pay more for reliable power
A light in the dark: can satellites see mini-grid electrification?
Peer-reviewed research testing whether night-time satellite imagery, the basis of most electrification maps, can detect the 700+ mini-grids built across sub-Saharan Africa. Largely, it can't.
- mini-grids analysed
- 700+
- mini-grids analysed
- countries, 2014–2023
- 20
- countries, 2014–2023
- of known sites flagged as electrified by OEMaps
- 9%
- of known sites flagged as electrified by OEMaps
Which appliances actually grow mini-grid demand?
A multi-year field experiment across 25 mini-grid sites in Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania testing whether appliance financing raises electricity consumption. Productive-use appliances did; household appliances didn't.
- consumption per user with productive-use financing
- +48%
- consumption per user with productive-use financing
- consumption of top-20% productive users vs peers
- 16×
- consumption of top-20% productive users vs peers
- connections across 25 sites
- 12,000+
- connections across 25 sites