Access to electricity in Africa: the importance of the independence of regulatory authorities

Abstract This paper assesses the effect of regulatory authority independence on access to electricity in 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 2000 and 2021. We use an index of regulatory independence for the assessments based on three attributes: regulatory and organizational independence and financial autonomy of the regulatory authority. We estimated the effect of the independence index on the coverage rate of 40 sub-Saharan African countries and the network access time of 8606 companies, respectively, using a Tobit regression model and quantile regression. The result shows that the independence of the regulatory authority has a positive and significant influence on the rate of access and the time of third-party access to electricity networks. The robustness of these results shows us that the third-party network access time depends significantly on organizational autonomy and that the influence of the lack of independence on the electricity coverage rate differs according to the regional sub-blocs depending on the institutional quality and the responsibility of the regulator. We recommend strengthening the capacity of regulators by limiting the level of state interference in regulatory processes in terms of intervention in decision-making, organization, administration, and financing.