Data portal for electrification planning in Nigeria available

November 10^th 2020 | To create sustainable access to electricity for people in rural Nigeria, Reiner Lemoine Institute participated in the Nigerian Energy Support Programme (NESP). In this context, a comprehensive data portal for electrification planning for the whole of Nigeria has been created, which was launched today in an official opening ceremony with the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Power, both virtually and on site in Abuja, Nigeria.

New data for electrification planning in Nigeria

The platform features, among other things, data on the location of the settlements, their size and their distance from the power grid. These were collected, created, and further developed using existing data sets, such as global population data sets derived from high-resolution satellite images, official census data, OpenStreetMap data, and data from on-site surveys. These data sets cover different levels of detail, such as households or villages. The data creation was accompanied by the establishment of a database management system to allow for a structured use, completion and updating of the data.

Data portal provides decision-making basis and monitoring platform for politics and economy

The resulting data sets were visualized and are now available online under an open-data license for all stakeholders. On the one hand, they can be used for electrification research, but the platform also enables data analyses to be used as a basis for decision-making in the public sector and as an indicator of private market potential. For the first time, an online map now illustrates a comprehensive database for electrification planning for all of Nigeria – in the first phase of the NESP, only data for five states was available.

The project was financed by the EU and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Nigerian Energy Support Programme (NESP). It took place in close cooperation with experts in Nigeria and INTEGRATION Environment & Energy GmbH, which in turn advises the Nigerian government on energy infrastructure issues on behalf of the German Association for International Cooperation (GIZ).