NDP9 Infrastructure Aspects

Energy and Water

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Energy
• Access to energy/electricity is widely recognised as major driver of
economic growth
• Significant improvements have been made in recent years; however,
Somalia still faces a situation where energy access is severely limited for
the majority of the population.
• This includes both access to electricity and other sources of energy like
biomass and fossil fuels.
• Energy suppliers have struggled to meet growth in established demand in
recent decades; largely because of instability, the energy sector has been
unable to meet latent demand and provide for stable and affordable
access for most of the population, which has contributed to inadequate
social indicators and hindered economic growth.
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Energy contd.
• Electricity access rate is estimated at 15 percent, meaning that around 11
million Somalis lack access to electricity services. Urban access is estimated at
33 percent, and rural access at 4 percent.
• With an average household size of 5.9, this translates to approximately 1.8
million un-electrified households nationwide.
• Due to inadequate infrastructure and regulatory framework, the supply is
highly fragmented and therefore inefficient, leading to one the highest prices
in the world.
• Private sector players supply more than 90% of power in urban and peri-
urban areas using local private mini-grids, having invested in diesel-based
systems of between 500 kVA to 5000 kVA installed capacity per mini-grid.
• These mini grids are usually zoned, with each operator building, owning, and
operating the generation, transmission, distribution and maintenance, as well
as collecting tariffs. Therefore, there is no physical national grid in Somalia.
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Energy Sources
• Current primary sources for providing heat include sunlight, biomass,
bottled kerosene, compressed LP gas and electricity.
• Majority of Somalia’s population, perhaps 80-90%, relies on traditional biomass
fuels, wood and charcoal
• Annual consumption of charcoal is estimated at around 4 million tons per year, which
is a rate that is quickly exhausting Somalia’s few remaining forests (AfDB, 2015).
• 2017/18 household survey: 47% of Somali households use charcoal, 20% use wood
stoves.
• Primary sources for providing electricity are currently high-speed diesel
generation sets (HSDGs) with limited use of grid-tied solar photovoltaic (PV)
and very limited use of grid-tied asynchronous wind power turbines.
• There is also utilization of Pico PV and Small Home Solar (SHS) PV electricity
systems for residential lighting in both urban and remote areas.

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Energy Prices
• Somalia’s price of electricity can reach a maximum of US$1/kWh - one
of the costliest places in the world to buy power.
• Somalia ranks in the upper 5% globally for power cost, and in the
upper 15% globally for power expenditure as a share of GNI per
household (World Bank, 2016).
• This is largely due to low efficiency in both the power generation and
distribution systems.
• Somalia consumes in excess of 121,000 liters of diesel fuel per day to
support the installed generation capacity. This figure will inevitably
grow with additional capacity installed and the total daily
consumption of diesel is expected to reach 694,000 liters in the
medium term, given the growing demand from rapid urbanization.
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Energy challenges on supply side
• The generation capacity is insufficient to meet the current loads.
• The current generation is not being used efficiently due to lack of
investment in the equipment required to synchronize the operation of
existing units as well as shortage of operations and maintenance staff
trained (up to 40-50%) in use of equipment required for synchronous
operation of generating units.
• There are high technical and commercial losses in most systems.
• Fragmented generation and distribution systems resulted in
considerable inefficiencies severely limiting growth in the sector.

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Electricity Access Deficit in the Horn of Africa Region
Country Popn Access Access Urban Access Rural Access Installed Avg
(m) rate deficit popn rate popn rate capacity tariff
(m pple) urban rural $/kwh
Djibouti 1 50% 0.5 78% 67% 22% 2% 67 MW 0.22

Eritrea 5 32% 3.4 36% 74% 64% 39% 130 MW 0.21

Ethiopia 110 44% 62 20% 97% 80% 44% 4,300MW 0.03

Kenya 50 70% 15 27% 77% 73% 33% 2,300MW 0.16

Somalia 15 52% 7.2 51% 77% 49% 22% 103 MW 1.2

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Strategies
1) Developing renewable and non-renewable energy sources to
increase supply.
2) Establishing a national regulatory authority for energy market
governance.
3) Strengthening the administrative and technical capacity of the
federal and states ministries of energy.
4) Ensuring the needs of vulnerable groups – particularly women, the
youth and displaced persons–in intervention design and
implementation.

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Interventions
1) Prepare legislation establishing the national regulatory authority for
energy sector and operationalize the agency by 2021.
2) Undertake energy market regulatory reforms to improve efficiency
of generation and supply systems, and therefore improve reliability
of supply and bring down energy prices.
3) Increase the energy supply from both renewable and fossil fuel
sources, and as result increase the access to energy from 15% to 45
% of population by 2024; or 6% growth in access per year.

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Water
• This is covered under two pillars—Pillar 3 (economic development)
and Pillar 4 (Social development). It covers three aspects:
• Water and sanitation
• Water for livestock
• Water for arable land
• Water and Sanitation
• Clean water and sanitation services are significant in fight against
poverty.
• Improved water and sanitation are critical for health, school
performance, productivity and household income.
• Water-related sicknesses put severe burdens on health services and
keep children out of school.
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Water and sanitation contd.
• Despite investments in the sector made by governments, NGOs, development
partners, and the private sector, the outlook for access to safe and adequate
supplies of water in Somalia is low—with basic water supply coverage at 52%
(28% in rural and 83% in urban areas).
• The water shortage is exacerbated by drought which also increases water
contamination.
• Access to clean water and sanitation services is higher in urban areas compared
to rural, nomadic and IDPs areas.
• IDPs increased from 305,000 in 2016 to over 2.4 million in 2019, displaced mostly
by drought and conflict.
• In health, less than 50% of health clinics have access to clean water and
sanitation.
• In education, only 52% of schools are classified as permanent structures, and
only 61% of those schools (52%) have WASH facilities.
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 Access to Water

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 Access to Sanitation

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Strategies to improve water and sanitation
• Coverage to under served communities—improve drainage, sewage and
solid waste management to vulnerable communities, including under-
served schools and health clinics.
• Human and Institutional Capacity building—build human and
institutional capacities for sustainable water supply
• Hygiene promotion—focus on promoting good hygiene practices and
behavior change to lessen the burden on the heath sector.
• Build partnership—with the international community and development
partners to support water and sanitation related infrastructure.
• Policy and Legal framework—put in place a policy and legal framework to
support the sector. Private-Public Partnership law will enhance
accessibility and availability of clean water and sanitation service.
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Water for Livestock
• Water is especially important in traditional livestock and agriculture
sectors and is often the source of conflict.
• In dry seasons, pastoralist and agro-pastoralist outside riverine regions
traditionally rely on earth dams and underground reservoirs with
cemented walls (or Berkeds) for watering of their animal.
• During the civil war,
• much of old public dams fell into disrepair
• privately owned Berkeds are insufficient to growing demand for water for both
human and livestock consumption.
• It is estimated only 2200 water points out of 5,089 water points are
functional and perennial under normal non-drought conditions.
• Of the 2200 functional water sources, only around 500 are in improved
conditions, mainly deep boreholes.
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Water for livestock—situational analysis contd.
• Groundwater sources are technically demanding to identify and exploit
• Aquifers/permeable rocks are deep (more than half the boreholes are over 130 m
deep, with some over 400 m)
• Water within aquifers is often of low quality (salty or hard) which makes it
unsuitable as drinking water or for irrigation.
• Most shallow wells become less reliable and/or water quality deteriorated in
many parts of the country as water in shallow aquifers became salty.
• Water reservoirs are generally dilapidated.
• Consequences?
• Livestock health and survival is negatively affected
• Reduced productivity
• Limited resilience to droughts
• Intra and inter-conflicts over the limited resources

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Water for livestock—intervention
• Mobilize resources for large-scale investments in watershed
management and infrastructure to mitigate the impact of extreme
cycles of rainfall, floods and drought (which is critical for the resilience
of Somali livelihoods dependent on livestock)

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Water for arable land
• WB estimates about 3m hectares of cultivable land in Somalia, of which almost
2.3m hectares could produce crops under rainfed conditions.
• The remaining 700,000 hectares could produce crops under pump or recession-
controlled irrigation, mainly along the two main rivers, the Shabelle and Juba.
• Only 110,800 hectares are currently irrigated
• This is less than half the 222,950 hectares under irrigation just before the civil war and
only about 15% of total potential irrigable land.
• Almost two-thirds of all cultivable land (rainfed and irrigated) is in the southern
parts of the country.
• Apart from the fertile areas along and between the two major rivers and a small
cultivated area in the northwest of the country, Somalia is primarily rangeland
(open country used for grazing or hunting animals), with low productivity
potential for crops—which is a result of very low and unreliable rainfall.

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Partly because of insufficient water, the average yield per hectare is very low as
shown in Table ‘14’.

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Water for arable land—challenges
• Low irrigation capacity (there is much lower and inconsistent surface
water availability in the agricultural heartlands of southern Somalia
where most the irrigated farming is located—which is largely due to
dilapidated state of pre-war irrigation and flood control infrastructure
and minimal rehabilitation efforts made).
• Pre-war large-scale flood control and irrigation schemes, consisting
of barrages, canals, and other infrastructure in the middle and lower
reaches of the Juba and Shabelle rivers, particularly in banana
production areas have long fallen into disrepair.

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Water for arable land—challenges contd.
• Cumulative silting of the riverbed over the past three decades has
resulted in rivers easily breaking banks in rainy seasons,
• often causing extensive floods resulting in crop losses and displacement
• making rural road impassable and therefore making transport and marketing of
harvest from unaffected areas difficult, if not impossible.
• Pumping stations that supplied water through the canal systems in areas
where irrigation by gravity is not feasible have long been either looted or
ceased to function due to lack of maintenance.
• Outside the riverine regions, where rainfed agriculture is largely
practiced, there is unpredictable rainfall (leading to water shortages)
which limits production of maize, sorghum, fruits, vegetables.
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Water for arable land—strategies
• Recent initiative: Wind and solar installations for pumping water and
providing drip irrigation for fruits and vegetables, the processing of
tomato paste and ketchup for the domestic market, and the export of
grapefruit to Turkey.
• Other strategies;
• Rehabilitate the pre-war irrigation and flood control infrastructure in
southern Somalia to improve supply of surface water availability
• Improve efficiency of water use and irrigation techniques to reduce soil
salinization, and water logging through effective water use planning and
regulation
• Improve the resilience of rainfed agriculture through increased rainwater
harvesting and capacity of water reservoirs

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