Improving Health Outcomes & Energy Access in Zambia

The current COVID-19 crisis has brought into sharp relief the inadequacy of Africa’s healthcare infrastructure—including access to energy—especially in the case of the rural poor. Across all the main health facilities in Zambia, less than 30 percent of those in rural areas have a functional connection to the grid, which includes rural health posts and rural health clinics. Without reliable access to electricity, many necessary components of a hospital, such as lights, anesthesia and vaccine storage, medical devices, and imaging equipment, become ineffective and unusable, especially in times of urgent medical needs.

In this context, distributed renewable energy (DRE) solutions present a key opportunity to provide clean, reliable, and cost-effective electricity to health clinics, which can dramatically transform the quality of healthcare services provided to rural communities.

Africa Clean Energy Technical Assistance Facility (ACE TAF), World Resources Institute (WRI) and Power for All are supporting the Ministry of Health to develop a comprehensive set of activities to help bring electricity to Zambia's unelectrified health care facilities.