Insights from Sub-Saharan Africa
Research paper
Published 5 November 2019
Updated 14 December 2020
ISBN: 978 1 78413 364 1
This ethnographic study is the first of its kind to analyse energy access and resilience strategies deployed in two refugee camps in Kenya and Burkina Faso. It highlights the need for new methodological approaches to expand the evidence base for humanitarian energy interventions and policies.
There is nothing new about attempts to deploy renewable energy technologies or more efficient cooking equipment in refugee camps. Some of the earliest attempts in East Africa to use solar photovoltaic technology for large rural populations, for example, date to 1982 when solar technologies were used to pump water in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Somalia.2 However, until recently these had not gone beyond sporadic pilot cases and household access to electricity remains unusual. In the 21st century, several new factors affect deployment considerations, including the rise in the numbers of those living in prolonged displaced situations; pressure from host countries not to use forest resources; Sustainable Development Goal 7, which targets access to affordable, clean energy for all by 2030; and the falling cost of clean energy technologies.3
In the past, efforts were often led by governments, NGOs, humanitarian agencies and donors. Today, recommendations for improving the delivery of energy in humanitarian situations are focusing on partnerships with the private sector and the promotion of local markets as the most efficient way to scale up better energy services in refugee camps.
While tangible examples of successful initiatives are few, an argument for the increased role of the market – encouraged by learning from energy access projects in the development field more generally – is shaping rhetoric and research. Risks for refugee camp dwellers remain regarding user uptake and sustainability – i.e. making sure that households use and buy the required equipment and/or fuel at an affordable price, adopt the correct methods of use, and that equipment is maintained.
In this context, there are important lessons to be learned from close attention to people’s current material practices around food, fuel, refrigeration, lighting and charging in refugee camps. The appropriate design of future humanitarian energy interventions depends on placing people and practices centre stage.
This paper presents alternative ways of engaging with the material culture of displaced people living in two refugee camps – Kakuma in Kenya and Goudoubo in Burkina Faso. It takes seemingly ordinary, mundane, even banal, objects and examines their histories, meaning and active roles in people’s social and economic lives. In doing so it offers new insights into the ways that people experience, understand and seek to meet demands for energy services.
The paper is based on qualitative research into energy demand and use in households, enterprises and community institutions, and presents new details about how people living in the two camps cook, light their homes, cool their food and water, and power their devices.
The findings suggest that qualitative data should be taken into account to better understand energy demand in the context of humanitarian emergencies and long-term displacement. Qualitative research data can help in understanding processes of technological innovation, the exchange relationships between refugee and host communities, the cultures of care or resilience, and the lasting effects of failed interventions.
Studying material culture means accounting not just for what people have but also for how they experience or engage with material things, technologies, infrastructures and systems in everyday life. It means considering people’s lived experiences, their strategies for ‘getting by’ that make use of the resources at their disposal and the forms of knowledge that allow them to adapt technologies for use.
This introduction establishes the importance of learning from how people live and engage with objects and summarizes key lessons from the research for policymakers and practitioners. It describes how qualitative methods and data can deepen the understanding of energy in humanitarian contexts. It also outlines the methodology used and introduces the stories of eight objects.
Recent studies have extended our understanding of energy in contexts of forced displacement. While they have helped to lay the foundations for current interventions in humanitarian energy, gaps in the evidence base remain.4 These include the ways that people use, perceive and experience energy technologies; the way we understand non-market or informal exchange relationships through which people access energy goods and services; and the extent of people’s working knowledge of materials, tools, technologies and physical systems.
Much recent research on energy in contexts of forced displacement and humanitarian intervention has focused on possessions or desired objects rather than on people’s behaviour when using these objects. So, while research studies and more practical toolkits have produced an exhaustive index of the types of ‘energy technology’ being used in refugee camps, they have provided little detail about how these are used in people’s everyday lives.5 Such studies have revealed that forcibly displaced people frequently carry cooking pots, water carriers, solar panels and battery-powered torches across international borders but little is known about why these items are so highly valued, or how people adapt them for use in new settings. Perhaps this is because, when ‘energy’ is reduced to a technical or financial problem, humanitarian agencies focus on providing a basic set of material assets. One unintended consequence of this body of work is that energy poverty can sometimes appear as an index of material possessions.
This paper argues for a different approach that can provide a more textured understanding of issues around energy consumption, exchange and technology. Understanding and engaging with energy in terms of social or cultural practices is vital if humanitarian actors are to make appropriate and effective interventions. Such an approach could transform the design of humanitarian energy technologies, the delivery of humanitarian energy programmes, and procurement decisions in humanitarian energy organizations.
Gaps in the evidence base around humanitarian energy can be filled using qualitative data methods. As this paper shows, qualitative data can boost understanding of how displaced people live with and without energy services, how existing energy technologies and infrastructures are embedded in daily practices and routines, and how people accommodate themselves to things when they break down or fail. As the paper also shows, qualitative data can help to understand how experiences of energy poverty, energy vulnerability or energy precariousness in refugee camps may be shaped or reinforced by camp infrastructures or previous humanitarian interventions. Qualitative data can provide the humanitarian energy community with vital insight into the social and economic practices that shape people’s access to energy services in contexts of forced displacement.
The research findings outlined here are particularly relevant in the context of growing attention to the delivery and provision of energy services for displaced people.
What can a water cooler, a sheet of metal, a cooking pot, a lump of charcoal, a pair of bellows, and a piece of wire tell us about energy use and its social and economic implications in situations of forced displacement?
Studies of forced displacement in sub-Saharan Africa rarely cover the objects that people carry with them when they move away from conflict, threats of persecution or rapid environmental change. Strapped onto backs, tucked into rucksacks, loaded onto lorries, stored carefully inside temporary homes and shelters, these are the things that people rely upon in contexts defined by uncertainty, precariousness and vulnerability.
These are often things laden with meaning. As journalists have reported, for example, the cooking pots and goatskin water sacks carried by Tuareg people from Mali to Goudoubo refugee camp in Burkina Faso are expressions of cultural heritage and tradition.6 Such reports directly inform humanitarian interventions. The humanitarian response to the refugee crisis in Burkina Faso has included programmes aimed at ‘enhancing’ the skills of traditional artisans, with a view to promoting refugee arts, crafts and jewellery products in international markets.7 This paper goes further by examining how items such as cooking pots and goatskin water bags are actually used? Why are they so significant that people bring them on uncertain or insecure journeys? And what role do they play in the provision of basic energy services for people with limited or no access to mains electricity?
The material practices documented in this paper identify energy as an important area of technological innovation in sub-Saharan Africa’s humanitarian settlements. The ways in which people repurpose humanitarian goods should be understood as more than simply ‘tinkering’ and this paper presents such practices as socio-technical innovations,8 which demonstrate both improvization and resourcefulness.
The examples looked at in this paper speak precisely to the point that refugee innovations have extended and supported the resilience of fragile communities. Innovation in these contexts takes organizational, transactional and technological guises. This paper shows how displaced people frequently see limitations in the design and suitability of energy technologies, and that they constantly seek to repair, maintain and repurpose technologies. Rather than straightforwardly reject broken or unsuitable products, people adapt and repurpose them for use.
Understanding such processes of innovation is crucial if appropriate solutions to the energy needs and priorities of displaced people in humanitarian emergencies are to be developed. While the paper does not set out to challenge the critical importance and success of many examples of humanitarian innovation, it highlights the ways in which forms of bottom-up innovation of energy products emerge as a supplement to the top-down approaches of international agencies in partnership with NGOs, commercial and academic organizations.9 Here ‘local’ does not mean the opposite of global and is not a shorthand term for ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’. Rather it describes knowledge and innovation that is rooted in particular places, practices and relationships. What is meant by ‘local’ knowledge and innovation in Kakuma and Goudoubo, for example, may be the outcome of exchanges between refugees and their host communities, as well as between refugees and international agencies.
This study of energy in humanitarian contexts involves a recalibration of focus around material artefacts, drawing on methods from social anthropology and design studies.10 The network of relationships that connect people, spaces and technologies and energy services like lighting, heating or charging are often too large to research in their entirety. Focusing on specific objects enables following these relationships in a non-linear manner, revealing previously unexpected connections between material things, relationships, spaces and people.
Everyday objects are ‘heuristics’ or ‘entry points’ for learning about people’s lives.
Everyday objects are ‘heuristics’ or ‘entry points’ for learning about people’s lives. Wires or water carriers, for example, can be starting points for learning about the experiential and transactional dimensions of energy poverty, and the exchange and exchange-relationships upon which access to basic services depend. This approach focuses attention on the ways that people engage with fuel and electricity in their everyday activities by working with communities to understand how refugees and communities engage with energy technologies and the objects that surround them. Focusing on material objects makes it possible to record the forms of material knowledge that people use and deploy in everyday life, moving beyond an audit of what people have to an understanding of how things are built, maintained and used, what they mean and how they inform people’s knowledge of the world.
The fieldwork research on which this paper is based took place in Goudoubo and Kakuma during eight trips between March and October 2017 by trained teams of Kenyan and Burkinabe researchers, supported by experienced social scientists, designers and humanitarian energy specialists.
The approach built directly on the MEI’s previous studies from Kakuma and Goudoubo.11 The research team reviewed the survey and focus group data collected in 2016 and 2017 by Practical Action, as part of the MEI, and completed an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the large quantitative/baseline dataset. The team identified key areas of survey data and focus group discussions where qualitative methodologies could add detail, texture and understanding. It then set out to expand the ethnographic evidence base for decision-making, with a view to informing interventions that aim to improve access to energy for displaced communities.
The findings of this analysis were discussed with key informants in the humanitarian energy sector, including the lead consultants on previous MEI reports and MEI research managers. The research team discussed the approach with scholars involved in practice-led or ethnographic research projects around energy consumption or energy and displacement in the global north.
The analysis of previous research was accompanied by an extensive review of qualitative methods for researching energy practices, habits and behaviour in academic research studies. Key studies in social anthropology, sociology and geography have introduced ethnographic, human-centred, object-oriented, visual, participatory and collaborative methods to the study of energy demand. At the centre of these approaches is the study of energy as a ‘social practice’, focused on what people use energy for. Dominant approaches to energy demand, scholars argue, marginalize questions about what people use energy to do or achieve.12 Yet, for most people, fuel and electricity only have value in the context of daily activities or practices: from lighting a space, to cooking food, to sharing information, communicating with friends and relatives, or making a financial transaction. Social science researchers have begun to take a practice-focused approach to energy demand in domestic and urban contexts in Western Europe. But there have been few, if any, attempts to apply this methodological approach to the study of energy in contexts of forced displacement or rural development.
The review and analysis of these previous studies laid the groundwork for a novel methodological approach to the study of energy practices and technologies in refugee camps. The research team compiled a portfolio or toolkit of established techniques and approaches to the study of energy practices and energy demand. The researchers built upon these approaches in an open-ended, iterative manner, during pilot trips and research workshops that aimed to establish contextually appropriate methods to the quality study of energy in refugee camps. Pilot visits to Kakuma and Goudoubo identified specific questions around domains of ‘consumption’, ‘technology’ and ‘exchange’, and also identified the value of focusing on specific objects or things.
Subsequent workshops evaluated the methods and developed extended diagrams that distilled these questions and identified further areas for investigation.
Over six months researchers worked closely with camp inhabitants in situ to reconsider the stories that everyday items can tell, the qualities they have and their impact in people’s lives.
The research followed people and their possessions across multiple spaces, including:
In each location things were inventoried and their connections to other things, places and people were mapped. In each location researchers paid attention to the ‘everyday objects’ around them. These things were a starting point for interviews. People were invited to discuss how they came to have them, use them, store them and keep them working. Then they were asked to show how they used, kept and maintained them. The researchers asked the following questions: How are people using these things? What are people doing with these things? How are these things used to make particular places or spaces? Where did these things come from? How did people get them? How are these items connected to other things?
The approach to these interviews sought to build rapport with informants and to use appropriate non-intrusive ways of gathering data. The researchers put conversations and personal relationships with informants first, and structured interactions in a flexible way. The researchers were asked to look for feedback, to be attentive to how their questions were making people feel, to improvise, to take time with people, to listen and to be respectful. Many of the interviews involved multiple follow-ups with the same researchers meeting the same people twice or three times.
By combining recorded transcripts with documented observations the research team compiled stories of use. For this paper the authors chose eight objects with large data sets that offer powerful insights of daily life, and which speak to wider concerns with energy efficiency, host and refugee relations, the experience of displacement, socio-economic status and social mobility, and processes of ad hoc design, innovation, re-purposing, modification, maintenance and repair.
The research data generated privileged biographical information, detailed the materiality of objects, examined how people use objects and methodological details through note-taking or photography/video.
This paper uses the word ‘stories’ to distinguish qualitative data sets from quantitative data sets. Eight stories are compiled from the data bank of field notes, interviews, observations, transcripts and audio/visual material collected by field teams, with names anonymized throughout. Employing story-based accounts acknowledges the importance of how people utilize objects to narrate their everyday social practices. The methods and material presented here offer important lessons for policymakers and practitioners. Qualitative perspectives are vital for managing but also creating innovative approaches to the energy needs of vulnerable people in displaced communities.
