Urban Development and Energy Access in Informal Settlements. A Review for Latin America and Africa

Abstract

Focusing on Latin America and Africa, a review on energy access, efficient energy use, and energy efficiency of the built environment in informal settlements of developing countries is presented, providing information on energy issues such as access, consumption, distribution, services, end use, technologies, and energy efficiency. Information about the main patterns of energy use and consumption in slums is provided, and the main barriers that reduce access to modern (and more efficient) energy sources for dwellers are highlighted.

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Procedia Engineering 161 ( 2016 ) 2093 – 2099
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
1877-7058 © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of WMCAUS 2016
doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2016.08.680
ScienceDirect
World Multidisciplinary Civil Engineering-Architecture-Urban Planning Symposium 2016,
WMCAUS 2016
Urban Development and Energy Access in Informal Settlements.
A Review for Latin America and Africa
Federico Maria Buteraa, Paola Caputo*,a, Rajendra Singh Adhikaria, Angelo Facchinib,c
aDept. Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, via Ponzio 31, 20133, Milan, Italy
bIMT Alti studi Lucca, P.za San Francesco 19, Lucca, Italy
cNational research Council, Institute for Complex Systems, Rome, Italy
Abstract
Focusing on Latin America and Africa, a review on energy access, efficient energy use, and energy efficiency of the built
environment in informal settlements of developing countries is presented, providing information on energy issues such as access,
consumption, distribution, services, end use, technologies, and energy efficiency. Information about the main patterns of energy
use and consumption in slums is provided, and the main barriers that reduce access to modern (and more efficient) energy sources
for dwellers are highlighted.
This review also reveals from one side that data on energy, and in particular energy efficiency, are missing or out-dated, as well as
data and information on the interaction between energy distribution companies and slums’ dwellers. Further investigations are now
in progress in order to fill the gap. In particular, in cooperation with local stakeholders and utilities, workshops and surveys with
interviews to people living in slums are being carried out.
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of WMCAUS 2016.
Keywords: informal settlements; energy access; energy consumption; Latin America; Africa.
1. Introduction
The impressive urban growth that we are witnessing in the last decades is essential for our future development.
Cities are among the most important engines of development, concentrating in a relatively small area minds, cultures,
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-02-2399-9488.
E-mail address: paola.caputo@polimi.it
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of WMCAUS 2016

2094 Federico Maria Butera et al. / Procedia Engineering 161 ( 2016 ) 2093 – 2099
innovation, economies, and network of relationships. At the same time, cities also concentrate some of the worst
characteristics of urbanization, such as inequalities and very poor living conditions in large peri-urban areas.
Slums and their dwellings may vary from simple shacks to more permanent structures, while access to basic services
and infrastructure tends to be limited or badly deteriorated. As of today, slum dwellers, whose global number is
estimated in about 1 billion, slightly less than one third of the global urban population.
Improving the living conditions in slums is a crucial topic also addressed by the sustainable development goals,
and access to modern energy services (electricity, clean and safe cooking systems) plays a fundamental role in
achieving these specific goals.
While the lack of modern cooking systems affects mainly health (indoor pollution due to biomass has a strong
impact on women and children health) and family expenditure, lack of electricity access has a strong impact on
education and on productive income-generating activities. For this reason, access to modern energy services (clean
cooking and access to electricity) for slum dwellers is a crucial need for improving their quality of life and promoting
the development of low income urban areas. Within this framework, slums electrification is a priority that still finds
barriers that prevent a fruitful cooperation between utilities, slum dwellers, and local authorities [1, 2, 3]. In particular,
among the barriers, connection fee and the inability to pay regularly are the most relevant and direct consequence of
the informality of the settlements: people cannot enter in formal agreements, and cannot pay a regular bill because of
irregular income. As a consequence of this, many families opt to pay a neighbor to share a meter or turn to unlicensed
electricians and even local cartels that provide the service illegally. [4, 5, 6].
This mechanism damages both the utilities and the dwellers: utilities experience, together with significant
insolvency rates, both technical and non-technical losses, while dwellers, both formal and informal suffer from voltage
outages due to the irregular load produced by the illegal connection. Furthermore, because of a virtually free
connection, electricity theft triggers inefficient habitudes and wasting.
On the other side, the fact that people often pay a fee to a middle-man and usually pays high prices for poor informal
services is an evidence of the fact that there is a fraction of slum dwellers that may pay electricity in the formal market,
but because of the above mentioned barriers cannot enter into a formal market. Illegal connections therefore represent
the desire of the poor to have access to the benefits that electricity provides.
This paper is focused on a research aimed at providing information on a wide spectrum of issues in informal
settlements related to energy such as access, consumption and distribution, energy services and end use, energy
technologies, energy efficiency level of the built environment.
2. Research Methodology
An analysis of energy consumption and energy efficiency in informal settlements of developing countries was
developed within a collaborative project among Enel Foundation, Politecnico di Milano and UN-Habitat. The project
aims at providing information on a wide spectrum of issues related to energy such as access, consumption and
distribution, energy services and end use, energy technologies, energy efficiency level of the built environment.
Furthermore, it investigates aspects related to mode of use, price paid for energy, business models and best practices
in informal settlements of Latin American and African cities. In particular, the role of utilities and policy makers in
promoting low cost solutions and business models able to enhance energy access and energy efficiency thereby
improving people’s living conditions is investigated. The main research steps are reported in Figure 1.
3. Research Methodology
The desk research activity was focused on understanding the state of the research on energy and slums. In general,
we found that for many countries such information is missing and, where present, data are old (2003-2007). This fact
represents a further motivation in performing the activities described in the present paper.

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Federico Maria Butera et al. / Procedia Engineering 161 ( 2016 ) 2093 – 2099

Fig 1. Research methodology scheme (dotted boxes indicate on site activities).
3.1. Energy and electricity access in Latin America
The Latin American and the Caribbean region (LAC) is one of the most urbanized in the world. Almost 80% of the
population lives in cities and, after an initial relevant acceleration, the current evolution of urban populations tends to
be limited to natural growth only. The number of cities in the region has increased 6 fold in 50 years. Half the urban
population now lives in cities with less than 500,000 inhabitants and 14% in megacities [7,8]. Progress regarding
access to water, sanitation and other services has increased the attractiveness of intermediate-size cities, which helps
more balanced urban systems in these countries. The percentage of the population living in cities in Latin America is
expected to rise reaching 86% by 2030 [9] and more than 90% by 2050 [10]. In Latin America 24% urban residents in
the region live in slums and this number is expected to grow by half a million people every year, reaching 120 million
by 2020 [11].
Fig. 2 – Percentage of urban population living in slums in the Latin America and Caribbean Region (elaborations on the basis of [7], [12];
data are from 2005 excluding Haiti, Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, provided for
2007).
In Latin America government policy has promoted penetration of clean cooking fuels such as natural gas and LPG.
This includes the development of an LPG delivery infrastructure in all regions, including rural regions, and subsidies
to LPG users. The rest of population relies on wood, kerosene, candles, expensive disposable batteries and other

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rudimentary, and often costlier, forms of energy [12]. As an example, Table 1 shows a comparison between Colombia
and Peru in terms of type of fuel used in the households for cooking at urban and slum scale.
Table 1. Energy source used for cooking (percent households) (elaborations on the basis of [7]).
Energy source Urban Non slum Slum
Colombia
(2005) Peru
(2004) Colombia
(2005) Peru
(2004) Colombia
(2005) Peru
(2004)
Electricity 8.3 1.3 8.5 1.7 7.0 0.6
LPG, natural gas 85.6 73.1 87.1 83.2 79.2 55.5
Kerosene, other liquid fuel 1.0 11.6 0.5 8.3 3.1 17.4
Coal, lignite 0.2 1.8 0.1 0.8 0.4 3.6
Firewood, straw, dung, charcoal, other 2.5 9.5 1.3 3.2 7.8 20.5
Don’t cook 2.4 2.6 2.4 2.8 2.4 2.3
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Table 2. Percentage of population with access to electricity access in LAC (elaborations on the basis of [13, 14])
Country Electricity access (%) Country Electricity access (%)
Argentina 96.3 Honduras 85.6
Bolivia 88.2 Mexico 99.2
Brazil 99.5 Nicaragua 72.5
Chile 99.6 Panama 89.1
Colombia 97.0 Paraguay 98.5
Costa Rica 99.0 Peru 90.8
Ecuador 94.0 Uruguay 99.1
El Salvador 92.0 Venezuela 99.7
Guatemala 84.6 Average 93.4
Among the South American countries, Peru has the second (after Bolivia) lowest rates of electricity access.
From a detailed picture of electricity access in LAC countries, it has been observed that there is a difference between
the whole country figures and those related to informal settlement, where electricity connection is available for the
84.7% of dwellers [9]. Statistics show that between 1970 and 2006 per capita yearly average energy consumption has
quadrupled (from 427 to 1,688 kWh) [7]. In Peru the monthly per capita average electricity consumption is about 30
kWh in rural areas and 100 kWh in urban areas [13]. Data on electricity access, however, in Latin America countries
can be misleading if not complemented with the reliability of the supply. In 2005, the average number of outages per
subscriber was 12.5, while duration of outages per subscriber was 16.5 hours [14].
3.2. Energy and electricity access in Africa
In 2008, Africa still had only 39.1% of its total population living in cities [15], making it the least urbanized region
in the world. African urban populations are also highly unevenly distributed over the continent’s sub-regions, ranging
from a 22.7% urbanization rate in East Africa to 57.3% in the Southern Africa region.
Furthermore, Africa’s urban slum populations is still growing, and in some of the fast-growing African cities almost
all of the current urban spatial growth is the result of slum and informal settlements proliferation.
It is also interesting that most urban growth in Africa now takes place in secondary and tertiary settlements (the
towns with less than 500,000 inhabitants) rather than in the largest cities. This is an even more noteworthy

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phenomenon given that the bulk of Africa’s urban transition, though yet to come, is only a generation away. By 2030
the majority of Africans will be urban residents, and the majority of them are expected to live in slums.
Fig. 3. Percentage of urban population living in slums in the Africa (elaborations on the basis of [10, 15]).
In Africa, access to modern energy for household cooking is very limited, with unsustainably large and growing
population directly relying on biomass, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Regarding electricity, access is about 30%
but with significant disparity between urban (89%) and rural (46%) areas [16].
Rates in the Northern African countries, instead, are closer to those of developed countries, with 97% in Morocco,
99% in Algeria and 100% in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. In many African countries, especially those in sub-Saharan
region, low electrification rates are compounded by very low levels of electricity consumption implying very limited
use of this energy service. It has been estimated [17] that basic modern energy needs can be satisfied with 50-100
kWh/person/year of electricity for lighting, health, education, communication and community services and with 50-
100 koe (600-1200 kWh) of modern fuel (or traditional fuel used in improved cook stoves) for cooking and heating
water). Data on electricity access, however, in African countries can be misleading if not complemented with the
reliability of the supply, as shown in Fig. 4 [18], where consequent impact of outages on electricity company sales is
also shown.
4. Local surveys
The research adopts a participative approach that involves local communities and relevant stakeholders operating
in slums. In particular, data collection is being carried out by surveying slum dwellers by means of a multi-tier
questionnaire [19], drafted in agreement with the ESMAP programme of the World Bank. The questionnaire covers
several aspects of energy use and energy efficiency in slums, ranging from purely architectonic aspects to energy use
patterns, and relationship with utilities and informal energy providers. Furthermore, the questionnaire is also improved
by means of “consultative” workshops that involved the slum communities and local stakeholders (e.g. policy makers,
experts and representatives from utilities and Universities). Data on questionnaire will be elaborated as soon as the
activity will be concluded. Results will be shared with local stakeholders and communities, while educational activities
on energy use and energy efficiency will be implemented and devoted to slum dwellers.
Case studies have been selected in Lima (representative of Latin America) and Lagos (representative of Africa). In
both cities, consultative workshops have been organized and local population has been involved.
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47464543
3938
3534
29
1817
13
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
SierraLeone 2005
CAR 2007
Sudan 2005
Chad 2007
Guina-Bissau 200 5
Nigeria 2007
Mozambique 2007
Ethopia2007
Madagascar2007
DRC 2005
Somalia 2005
Angola 2007
Comoros 2007
Rwanda20 07
Malwi 2007
E. Guinea2005
Mali 2007
Tanzania 2007
Bukrin F aso2005
Nigeria 2007
Uganda2007
Togo 2005
Benin 2007
Zambia 2007
Còte d'Ivoire 2007
Kenya 2007
Congo 2005
Cameroon 2007
Guiena 2007
Gambia 2005
Ghana 2007
Gabon 2005
Senegal 2007
Lesotho 2005
Namibia 2007
Sout h Africa 2007
Zimbawae 2007
Egypt 2007
Morocco 2007
Urban population living in slums (%)

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Fig. 4: Duration of electrical outages and impact on business sales in selected countries.
5. Conclusions
From the desk research conducted in the present work, it has been found that compared to Latin America, in Sub
Saharan Africa access to modern energy services is far more critical.
Kerosene is generally the most used fuel for cooking (with all the safety and cost problems deriving), followed by
biomass (with the health problems deriving). The major part of slum dwellers lays in the lower part of the energy
ladder. Also electricity access statistics are far away from those of Latin America, and the technical and non-technical
barriers are combined: not only the problem of illegal connections and theft is present, but also the grid often does not
reach the neighborhood. Exceptions to this general rule are Dakar and Lagos, were the energy access is estimated
above 95%. In comparison with Latin America, also the quality of service is a significant issue that reaches very high
values in number and duration in all cities, especially in Lagos.
Thus, African cities are only at the beginning of the path leading to modern energy use among the poor, exacerbated
by the fact that the percentage and the absolute number of slum dwellers is far higher than in Latin America. Because
of the scarce diffusion of LPG as cooking energy source, a special challenge has to be faced in Africa about the use
of more efficient cooking devices, not only more efficient electric devices.
Thermal comfort conditions are generally very poor in the slum’s dwellings, were the hot climate is exacerbated
by inappropriate construction materials (as iron sheets used for roofing) and by lack of ventilation. Growing the
availability of affordable electricity, it can be expected growing consumption at least for the use of fans, or of low
cost and inefficient air conditioners. The issue of the electric appliances efficiency is not yet an issue because of their
very limited diffusion due to the poverty of slum dwellers, but even a slight improvement of their conditions, as
experienced in Latin America, will make this issue critical and needing to be faced as early as possible.
In Latin American slums, the main challenge is the affordability of the service and the low efficiency of the electric
appliances, leading to higher consumption and costs.
The different situation is mainly due to a different approach both from utilities and policy makers: while in Africa
slum dwellers – being illegal - are generally kept out of any plan for extending the basic services, in Latin America
the approach has been more aimed to the legalisation of the slum dwellers, providing them energy services like

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Federico Maria Butera et al. / Procedia Engineering 161 ( 2016 ) 2093 – 2099
subsidized electricity and LPG for the poorest, thus promoting actions and policies for the development of
disadvantaged urban areas. Example of this can be found in the initiatives developed in Brasil by the local government
in cooperation with the electric utility both in Rio de Janeiro and in Fortaleza [20].
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Enel foundation, UN Habitat and Fondazione Politecnico di Milano for supporting the
research. A special thanks to Paolo Vercesi and Renata Mele for the great help in managing the work.
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