Rural electrification in West Africa remains low. In many countries, less than 20% of the rural population is on the electrical grid. As a result, off-grid home solar power is rapidly growing in West Africa and a need for geodata and GIS products adapted to the unique context of the sector. Oolu, a Senegalese off-grid solar company is building a GIS to both manage operations and estimate off-grid populations. This talk will outline the system’s open-source nuts and bolts, the methodology behind estimating off-grid households and what we learned in the process.
In order to better understand the opportunities for off-grid solar in West Africa, Oolu, a Senegalese solar company is building a GIS. This GIS had two key objectives: 1) Map the entirety of data in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System and 2) Estimate the number of off-grid households by administrative area.
To accomplish the first goal, a series of exercises were undertaken to integrate spatial data into their CRM and build out a system to regularly map its contents. The system itself is built on PostGIS, GeoServer and Leaflet and has been integrated into Oolu’s CRM. It has been deployed in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria.
The second goal was methodologically more complicated, given the lack of reliable data on grid coverage in West Africa. An offgrid population dataset was built using earth observation imagery, Open Street Map and gridded population data and then integrated into the GIS.
While this system was built specifically for the off-grid solar sector,the goal of this talk is to share the lessons learned for those seeking similar initiatives.
The talk will touch on the following areas:
- The architecture of the system
- Methodologies for estimating off-grid households by region using open data.
- The issues of working in an environment with uncertain sub-national administrative boundaries (multiple boundary definition, frequent re-ordering of subdivisions).
- Building practices of “spatial thinking”: Going beyond maps and integrating geo into strategy and planning.
- Why we chose FOSS instead of commercial solutions.
- What lessons can we apply to other projects? What would we have done differently?
For more information, contact Alex Orenstein (info@orensteingis.com / @oren_sa)