Electricity connectivity reaches 32pc

DAILY NEWS Reporter

OVER 32 percent of the households in Tanzania mainland were connected to electricity by 2016, the 2016 Energy Access Situation Survey has revealed.

The report, which has been released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), was produced out of information collected on connectivity of electricity to the main dwelling of household.

On rural-urban differentials, the report reveals that the connection of electricity to urban dwellings in 2016 was higher to 65.3 percent than that of rural households, which was 16.9 percent.

Moreover, urban dwellers who were not connected to electricity counted 34.7 percent while in rural areas the dwellers count up to 83.1 percent.

Furthermore, the survey identified Dar es Salaam with the highest proportion of household connected to electricity.

The region’s dwellers who are connected to electricity of any form count to 75.2 percent.Other regions include Njombe (50.5 percent), Kilimanjaro (42.6 percent) and Katavi (40 percent).

Regions which had proportions of households less than 20 percent connected to electricity include Rukwa (8.7 percent), Simiyu (11.5 percent), Shinyanga (12.8 percent), Geita (14.0 percent), Songwe (15.9 percent) and Kigoma (16.2 percent).

Apart from Dar es Salaam Region, which is purely urban, Rukwa Region was severely affected since only 3.3 percent of its rural households were connected to the electricity in 2016. Regions that had below 10 percent of their rural households connected to electricity were Songwe (6 percent), Kigoma (6.7 percent), Shinyanga (7.0 percent), Simiyu (9.3 percent) and Manyara (9.7 percent).

The situation is different for urban areas since the dwellings that connected to the electricity ranged from 26.6 percent for Rukwa Region to 88.7 percent for Kagera Region. However, the report explained that there has been an increasing pace of electricity connection especially in rural areas.

The survey attributed the improvement to the establishment of the Rural Energy Agency (REA). The government is currently implementing a national energy policy whose goal is to increase the country’s overall electricity connectivity to 50 percent by 2025 and to at least 75 percent by 2033.