First Principles
No grid, no anything else.
Energy is not the outcome of development. It is the prerequisite. Build the power first, and everything else becomes possible.
Every wallet, every clinic, every classroom in the Global South sits on one thing: power. Take it away and the rest is theory.
Around 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly half, still have no electricity. So the real infrastructure bet is not the app, it is the socket: solar home systems, mini-grids and pay-as-you-go meters that come before everything built on top of them.
Energy is not the outcome of development. It is the prerequisite.
Source: IEA, 2024.