CEO Blog: The COVID-19 balancing act

Azuri CEO Simon Bransfield-Garth offers his thoughts on why we need to get back to a new normal and how COVID-19 has paved the way to create a better world.

Much has been written about how COVID-19 is a “once in a generation” global challenge. With over a million excess deaths reported and the pandemic clearly far from over, we need to learn to live with the balance between the disease and the impact of the corrective measures.

In more developed nations, lockdown and social distancing have demonstrated some success in controlling the spread of the virus. Running businesses over Zoom and ordering food over the Internet makes such arrangements viable. But in many parts of Africa the situation is very different: over 90% of the population works in the informal economy, balancing short-term income and immediate expenditure with few opportunities for significant savings. Rural farmers cannot sell their produce over Zoom, and likewise social distancing, enforced sanitisation and restricted movement can be near impossible in high density towns or rural settings.

Fortunately, despite the worries at the outset, Africa as a whole has apparently not seen the sorts of challenges with COVID-19 that have been experienced elsewhere. The reasons for this are not clear but certainly the demographics of a much younger population (40% of people on the continent are under the age of 15) would seem to have an effect.

Azuri has been working closely with Government organisations within our territories to continue to provide both essential energy service to our customers and employment for our local teams throughout the pandemic. With “essential provider” status, we have been able to equip our field workers with appropriate PPE and change our ways of working to enable customers to continue to have access to reliable power, particularly when more and more people are spending time at home.

The impressive growth of solar power in Africa has been driven by a combination of entrepreneurial companies, powerful demand from customers and commercial finance from institutional lenders. Africa is showing its resilience in the face of a global challenge and we all need to do our part to continue on the path we have set to bring power on a commercial basis to the over half billion people that still lack access to reliable power.

As the world learns to deal with COVID-19, many voices long for “getting back to normal” and “going back to how it was”. But “normal” underserves millions of people and accepts energy inequality as a by-product of city infrastructure. “Normal” means 600 million people remain without access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa.

If we want to make real impact on energy access, climate change and increased standard of living, “getting back to normal” is not the way to go. Why would we go back to normal, when we can do something better?