EmpowerPlaygrounds

Fewer than 25 percent of Africans have access to electricity. In Uganda, only 5 percent of the population has access to electricity; in Kenya, 15 percent; in Congo, 6 percent. In oil-rich Nigeria, the energy demands are nearly twice what the country's creaking power plants can produce.

Perhaps 25 of the 44 sub-Saharan nations face crippling electricity shortages, a power crisis that some experts call unprecedented. For Africans who are lucky enough to have grid power, blackouts and rationing are commonplace. In Nigeria, only 19 of 79 power plants work. Ghana's government leases legions of generators to produce emergency power.

The gravity of this shortage is all the more apparent considering how little electricity sub-Saharan Africa has to begin with. Excluding South Africa, whose economy and power consumption dwarf other African nations', the region's remaining 700 million citizens have access to roughly as much electricity as do the 38 million citizens of Poland.

Much goes to industry—a single aluminum smelter near Mozambique's capital, Maputo, gobbles four times as much power as the entire rest of Mozambique. According to World Bank estimates, fewer than one in four sub-Saharan Africans are connected to national electricity grids.

War has devastated the power grid in Congo and stalled plans to develop its vast hydroelectric potential. In Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and parts of West Africa, drought has shrunk rivers and slashed the generating capacity of hydroelectric dams. Drought in Ghana, for example, has crippled gold and aluminum production and set off blackouts in Togo and Benin, which buy power from Ghana.

Once a major power exporter, Uganda now blacks out parts of its capital, Kampala, for as much as a day at a time and has leased two 50-megawatt generators.

The demand for hydropower in Uganda and its neighbors, also with drought, is blamed by some for a steady reduction in the water level of Lake Victoria, Africa's largest.

Zambia, where power is rationed almost every day, is a prime example of such energy problems. Barely 20 percent of households are wired for power—only 3 percent in rural areas.