Information and communication technology has emerged as a powerful and statistically significant driver of access to electricity across Sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new econometric study of twenty-two economies in the region. The research, published in Discover Energy, analysed 484 observations spanning the years 2000 to 2021 and found that ICT penetration raises electricity access both on its own and through measurable channels such as smart grids, load management, billing systems and fault detection. Perhaps most strikingly, the study concludes that this effect operates independently of institutional quality, a finding that challenges a substantial body of earlier work arguing that strong institutions are needed for technological gains to translate into better energy outcomes.
The scale of the electricity problem in Sub-Saharan Africa provides the backdrop for the analysis. More than 600 million people in the region lack access to electricity, with marked disparities across income groups. Even those who are connected face erratic, frequent and long power outages. Evidence from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys covering 2006 to 2010 shows that firms experienced an average of 10.5 power outages per month, each lasting approximately 6.6 hours, and more than half of surveyed African businesses identified unreliable electricity supply as a significant constraint on their operations. The study’s authors argue that these deficiencies, including insufficient generation capacity, supply instability and poor transmission and distribution systems, help explain the wide income disparities observed among the region’s economies.
To quantify the relationship between digital technology and electrification, the researchers constructed a panel dataset drawing on the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and Worldwide Governance Indicators databases. Access to electricity, measured as a percentage of the population, served as the outcome variable. ICT penetration was captured by averaging three indicators: the share of individuals using the internet, fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people, and mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people, a combination chosen to reflect ICT availability, usage and affordability. Institutional quality was measured as the average of six governance dimensions: control of corruption, government effectiveness, political stability and absence of violence, regulatory quality, rule of law, and voice and accountability, each rescaled to a 0 to 100 index through minimum-maximum normalization.
The analytical framework was anchored in modernization theory, which holds that development follows a structural transformation driven by technological advancement, social change and institutional change. The model also included three macroeconomic control variables: government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, gross fixed capital formation as a percentage of GDP, and the inflation rate. Because the twenty-two countries are not independent of one another, the authors tested for cross-sectional dependence using the Pesaran test and found that the null hypothesis of independence was rejected for all variables, confirming that shocks and spillovers link the economies in the panel.
A battery of second-generation econometric techniques followed. Panel unit root tests using the cross-sectional augmented Dickey-Fuller and CIPS procedures showed that the variables were stationary at the level and first difference, presenting a mix of I(0) and I(1) series. Slope heterogeneity tests adapted from Pesaran and Yamagata revealed that the relationship between ICT, institutions and electricity access differs across countries, reinforcing the case for methods that accommodate such diversity. Second-generation Pedroni and Westerlund cointegration models then established a long-run relationship among the variables, and the study turned to Driscoll-Kraay and augmented mean group estimators, which are robust to cross-sectional dependence, to produce unbiased long-run estimates.
The headline result is unambiguous: ICT penetration has a positive and significant effect on access to electricity. In the baseline specifications, a one-unit increase in ICT penetration was associated with roughly a 42 percent increase in access to electricity, rising to about 53 percent in a third model. The authors interpret this through three documented channels. On the demand side, ICT expansion is strongly tied to electrification levels, since low electricity access constrains ICT diffusion and can therefore drive electrification policy. On the complementary side, ICT and electricity are mutually reinforcing infrastructures, with energy supply enhancing ICT adoption and ICT expansion incentivising investment in electricity access. On the development channel, ICT growth increases electricity demand and improves access, for example through smart metering and grid management technologies.
The moderating role of institutions, however, did not behave as the authors initially hypothesised. Their theoretical framing had suggested that ICT’s effectiveness might be nonlinear across weak institutional structures, with a possible threshold of institutional quality beyond which ICT begins to exert a meaningful impact on electricity access. Instead, the marginal effect analysis showed that the relationship between ICT and electricity access remains the same across different levels of the interacting variable. The effect of ICT on electricity access does not depend on institutional quality, making the relationship linear and homogeneous across all levels. The authors suggest this contradicts existing empirical evidence that institutional structure fosters the ICT-electricity nexus, and they propose an explanation: because variation in institutional quality is weak across Sub-Saharan African economies, the ICT effect appears inherently robust and standalone. Their policy recommendation is that policies targeting ICT expansion can be applied independently of institutional levels, while improving institutions may still matter directly even though it does not moderate this particular relationship.
Among the control variables, government expenditure showed a positive and significant effect, with a one-unit increase associated with roughly a 30 percent increase in access to electricity, a result the authors link to Keynesian theory of public expenditure. In the long-run model, however, government expenditure turned negative and significant, which the authors attribute to the possibility that pronounced stabilization policies using expenditure instruments could crowd out private investment and induce demand-pull inflation, reducing productive capacity in the electricity sector. Gross fixed capital formation had a positive but statistically insignificant effect of about 5 percent, suggesting the estimated effect is not reliably different from zero, a finding the authors connect to the region’s persistent infrastructure deficit. Inflation exerted a negative and significant effect, with a one-unit rise associated with roughly an 18 percent decrease in electricity access, indicating that macroeconomic instability dampens electrification. The models showed good explanatory power, with an R-squared of about 0.68 and a jointly significant F-statistic of 244.38.
Because the slope heterogeneity tests signalled that effects differ across the distribution, the study also employed the Method of Moments Quantile Regression, which is suited to modelling heterogeneity and nonlinear effects. At the 25th, 75th and 90th quantiles of electricity access, ICT increased access by approximately 83, 87 and 89 percent respectively, showing that ICT’s impact grows stronger in economies with higher baseline access. The picture reversed in the income-group subsamples. In upper-middle-income countries, quantile estimates showed ICT’s impact declining from about 59 percent at the 25th quantile to 33 percent at the 90th, and in lower-middle-income countries from about 70 percent to 54 percent. In lower-income countries the pattern matched the full sample, with ICT’s impact rising from about 41 percent at the 25th quantile to 85 percent at the 90th. The mean-group estimates confirmed positive and significant ICT effects in every income group, ranging from about 19 to 86 percent in upper-middle-income economies, between 57 and 95 percent in lower-middle-income economies, and roughly 51 to 61 percent in lower-income economies.
The authors acknowledge the limitations of their design. The scope was constrained by data availability, covering only twenty-two selected Sub-Saharan African economies between 2000 and 2021, and they note that further studies could extend the analysis across developing economies to overcome small-sample bias. They also flag reverse causality between modern technology and income distribution as a priority for future research, given that ICT diffusion itself depends on electrification. Descriptive statistics underline how uneven the region remains: average electricity access stood at 41.6 percent across the sample, but only 21 percent in low-income countries, against higher averages in upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income groups, with ICT penetration and institutional quality following the same gradient. Within that uneven landscape, the study’s central message stands out: digital technology appears to be pulling the region toward wider electricity access on its own strength, and policymakers need not wait for institutional reform before investing in it.
Subject of Research: The role of ICT penetration and institutional quality in access to electricity in Sub-Saharan African economies
Article Title: The role of information and communication technology and institutional quality on access to electricity in SSA economies
Article References: Akinyele, O. D., & Odhiambo, N. M. (2026). The role of information and communication technology and institutional quality on access to electricity in SSA economies. Discover Energy, 6(1), Article 74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43937-026-00197-6
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s43937-026-00197-6
Keywords: ICT, electricity access, Sub-Saharan Africa, institutional quality, panel econometrics, quantile regression, smart grids, World Bank data, economic development, energy policy, role, information
News Source: Denise Maddox. (October 29, 2026). Digital Technology Boosts Electricity Access Across Sub-Saharan Africa, Study Finds. Scienmag.
