Mr. P stated that he needed the lamps immediately because he had signed a contract with the customer, and any delay would result in a penalty, so he needed the solar lights within 10 days. Our standard delivery time is 5-7 days. We prioritised this order in order to assist Mr. Pratt, and the lamps were ready in three days. Mr. Pratt even installed the poles before we shipped the lamps so that he could install the solar lights once they arrived.

Mr. P stated that he needed the lamps immediately because he had signed a contract with the customer that stated that any delay would result in a penalty, so he needed the solar lights within 10 days. Normally, our delivery time is 5-7 days. We prioritized this order to assist Mr. Pratt, and the lamps were ready in three days. Mr. Pratt even installed the poles before we shipped the lamps, so that he could install the solar lights once they arrived.

Kibedi believes the new street lighting has also boosted Jinja City’s tourism sector. Uganda closed its borders at the start of the pandemic, but in pre-Covid times, Jinja City drew international visitors for outdoor activities like boating on Lake Victoria or bungee jumping over the Nile. Other visitors come to see the city’s colonial architecture or to attend annual music festivals such as the Nyege Nyege Festival, which features East African electronica artists and attracts thousands of fans each year. “We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the number of tourists,” says Kibedi, “and I believe street lighting has something to do with that because you can now find tourists walking in the streets at night.” They do not feel threatened, and I believe this has a significant impact on tourism.

The rapid adoption of solar street lighting in cities underserved by conventional power generation is an example of Sub-Saharan Africa’s technological “leapfrogging.” However, Uganda’s transition to solar-powered street lights has not been without difficulties. While the costs are lower than for traditional lighting, the startup costs continue to put a strain on already-stressed city budgets. Jinja has the potential for widespread adoption. A World Bank programme called Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development, or USMID, is providing financial and technical assistance to address both issues: Until 2023, the programme has committed a total of $510 million to infrastructure development in places like Jinja City. Jinja City now has a master plan, thanks to technical assistance from USMID, that will allow for the citywide rollout of solar-powered street lights to continue.

According to Mbayo, the Ugandan Central Government has recognised the potential for continued rollout in Jinja City and has recently allocated funds to light an additional 54 kilometres of streets a significant portion of the city’s roughly 380 kilometres of roadway. The city council’s role now is to decide which streets will be lit next. Mbayo hopes that the funds will enable the city to finish lighting the central business district. Mbayo believes that the lesson for other cities is that solar-powered street lighting can be the first step on a longer path toward sustainable urban development. He has shared Jinja City’s success stories and lessons learned with administrators in other African cities, including Freetown, South Africa, and Dakar, Senegal. The Senegalese government launched its own project in 2019 to install 50,000 solar-powered street lights across the country; the work, carried out by the French company Fonroche Eclairage, was slowed by the pandemic but is now roughly halfway completed.

The success of these efforts could have far-reaching consequences for the region: Researchers believe that if solar-powered street lighting is installed in Sub-Saharan Africa, it could add tens of thousands of working hours per day by extending the workday past sunset while reducing electricity consumption from street lighting by 40%. Solar lighting has the potential to generate 96 to 160 gigatonnes of renewable energy across the subcontinent, more than doubling the current rate of energy generation. “We have no doubt that what we’re doing here is having an impact on people’s lives,” Mbayo says, “and we want this to spread to other cities.”

Summary
The seventh Sustainable Development Goal is to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy. The New Urban Agenda also pledges to provide inclusive and safe streets free of crime and violence, including gender-based violence. Solar-powered street lights can help to achieve these goals by increasing electricity supply, improving urban safety, and protecting the environment. This paper provides lessons from the Ugandan cities of Kampala and Jinja, where solar street lighting has proven to be less expensive to build and operate than conventional street lighting. It has also resulted in a variety of economic and social benefits, such as lower crime rates, improved road safety, a more vibrant night-time economy, and increased property values. Extending trading hours beyond daylight hours could add tens of thousands of working hours per day to the economy, equivalent to 14,000 full-time jobs nationwide.

According to this case study, installing and maintaining solar-powered LED street lights across Sub-Saharan Africa instead of conventional grid-based options could reduce upfront installation costs by at least 25%, electricity consumption from street lighting by 40%, and new road maintenance costs by up to 60%. Lighting new roads in Sub-Saharan Africa with solar would allow for the generation of between 96 and 160 GW of distributed renewable energy across the continent, more than doubling the sub-current continent’s energy generation capacity of 92 GW.
To reap these benefits, national governments should establish a more robust regulatory framework for growing and managing domestic solar markets. Ensuring that a diverse range of stakeholders, including local communities, are involved in project planning and implementation will help to maximise social impact and economic returns.
It will also allow for knowledge spillovers, allowing solar lighting and other emerging low-carbon technologies to rapidly scale up. These targeted efforts should be supported by capacity building for municipal governments, which need to improve their project delivery and budgeting capabilities in order to deliver scaled-up sustainable urban infrastructure. Solar lights are more appealing than incandescent lights due to favorable economics and a renewable, low-carbon power source. relying on centralized grids and fossil fuels Traditional grid-powered street lights and solar street lights are comparable in the sense that they look the same, are roughly the same height (around 3 meters), and provide the same basic amenity light. Although the brightness and ‘visual warmth’ provided by solar street lights may differ, the socioeconomic benefits of illumination, as outlined above, remain the same.