Powering health in Africa

At least 100,000 of the 170,000 health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa—from rural clinics to hospitals—lack affordable, reliable electricity, which creates critical gaps in health care access and delivery. In 2021, Professor Daniel Kammen was appointed senior advisor for energy, climate, and innovation for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). To begin addressing the health care inequities inherent in unreliable access to electricity, Kammen led a new initiative to collaboratively design renewable energy systems (primarily solar photovoltaics plus battery storage) for health care facilities in sub-Saharan Africa, while transforming those systems into minigrids that provide reliable electricity, Wi-Fi, and potable water for surrounding communities.

“Our goal is to power all of those 170,000 health clinics with sustainable energy, in a sustainable financial model, to enable just access to health care across the continent,” Kammen says. “We work hard on all aspects of that vision.”

Launched in 2023, USAID’s Health Electrification and Telecommunications Alliance—known as HETA or Powering Health—set the ambitious goal of 10,000 new renewable energy systems in its first five years, but progress has been so swift that its new goal is 25,000 systems.

“Imagine that you went to a hospital and the power was out for an hour or two,” says Laura Kwong, an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health collaborating with Kammen and others on HETA. “Without electricity, access to everything from x-rays and vaccines to baby warmers and oxygen machines would be unreliable. The fact that people are trying to provide health care without power is a bit mind-boggling.”

Kammen is now back at UC Berkeley, where his Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory serves as HETA’s chief intellectual hub.

“We do everything,” says Kammen, who retains his title as USAID senior advisor to HETA. “We innovate to have better and more useful sensors, we design the minigrid systems, and we engage with partners from around Africa to integrate the HETA concept into their own ministries of public health. And we do basic materials science research to develop batteries and other systems tailored to the African environment.”

A co-director of the Climate Equity and Environmental Justice roundtable, Kammen is the James and Katherine Lau Distinguished Chair in Sustainability, with appointments in the Energy and Resources Group, Goldman School of Public Policy, and Department of Nuclear Engineering. He served as science envoy in the US Department of State (2016–2017) and had prominent roles in the Nobel prize–winning efforts of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From early on in his academic career, Kammen has been internationally recognized for his research on cookstoves, health, and gender in Kenya. “Working on HETA was a perfectly natural evolution or extension of what I’ve been doing for decades,” he says.

The countries participating in HETA include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Uganda. In a May speech at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, President William Ruto of Kenya highlighted HETA as a key initiative for improving the health care of Africans. HETA is supported by the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, a multibillion-dollar commitment of funds from the Bezos Earth Fund and the IKEA and Rockefeller Foundations focused on addressing the fragmentation of the renewable energy sector in emerging economies.

Samuel Miles, a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) and recipient of the prestigious Link Foundation Energy Fellowship, is analyzing health data collected from HETA clinics in war-torn regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to quantify the relationship between reliable energy and mortality and morbidity. Other Rausser College collaborators on HETA include ERG graduate students Gbemisola Akinsipe and Aline Abayo and China Duff, an undergraduate majoring in environmental economics and policy. Professors Misbath Daouda and Ajay Pillarisetti in the School of Public Health are also involved, as are numerous students from other departments across campus.

“We are quantifying the impacts of reliable, clean energy on health,” Kammen says. “Our initial data suggests that if you can produce oxygen on demand at medical facilities, you can dramatically increase the survivability of patients.”

Kammen is also energized about the latest step HETA is taking toward health equity in Africa. Earlier this year, USAID launched HETA+, which incorporates the electricity needs of ethnomedicine, herbalists, and traditional healers. “We are working to support the integration of Western medicine and community medicine, because they too can do their jobs better with reliable energy.”