Benin Electrification Planning Project

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) will be a crucial part of Benin’s economic and social development. In order to facilitate the transitions needed for SDG7, robust energy planning efforts needed to be put in place.

Against this background, Kartoza together with its partners KTH Royal Institute of Technology division of Energy Systems (KTH-dES) and Smart Development Works (SNV) responded to, and were selected to carry out the preparation of an Indicative Least-cost Geospatial Electrification Plan to Achieve Universal Access in Benin.

Kartoza’s mission is to help governments and organisations leverage open source geospatial technology. In partnering with KTH and SNV, we provided an ensemble team with expertise in open source geospatial application development and training, electrification planning, and in-situ knowledge of the electrification industry in Benin. The result of the collaboration between the project partners, ESMAP and stakeholders and electrification practitioners in Benin is a least-cost electrification model for Benin, an SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure, Figure 1) and an electrification modelling platform (Figure 2) for visualising the model results. This platform aims to facilitate the critical work taking place to support the meeting of the Sustainable Development Goal 7 which seeks to ensure that access to electricity is ubiquitous.

Figure 1: The SDI Platform

Figure 2: The electrification modelling platform.