By Collins Dadzie and Ayodeji Ojo
Climate Change: A Shared Vulnerability
Across rural Africa, hundreds of millions still live without reliable electricity, while also bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. From heat waves to devastating floods, climate impacts are disrupting agriculture, damaging livelihoods, and undermining critical services like healthcare and energy.
These disruptions lower household incomes, trigger health crises, and drive displacement and migration. It is estimated that poor rural households in Africa lose about 5% of their total income due to heat stress and 4.4% due to floods annually, compared to better-off households. Additionally, climate change is projected to reduce cereal output potential in Africa by 16% to 27% by 2080, with some countries facing declines up to 60%. Solar PV-battery minigrids that have proven to be a compelling energy access solution for unserved and underserved communities in Africa are themselves at risk from climate hazards.
Extreme weather events such as floods and storms can damage solar panels, batteries, and distribution networks, while rising temperatures and erratic rainfall can impact performance and demand. To build climate resilience and economic stability in rural communities, the sector must enhance minigrids’ resilience to climate change impacts by integrating climate considerations into the design and development phases. This is necessary to ensure continuous energy service during extreme weather events to not only residential and commercial consumers, but also to critical services such as healthcare and water pumping. Resilient minigrids are also needed to boost agricultural productivity by enabling irrigation, food storage, and processing. Communication and early warning systems can also be enhanced through reliable electricity from climate-smart minigrids.
The success of minigrids depends not only on their technical resilience but also on the community’s ability to quickly adapt to climate change impacts and their sustained capacity to continue affording electricity during climate-related disruptions. An integrated approach to climate resilience is therefore essential, one that strengthens both the minigrid infrastructure and enhances the broader resilience of the communities they serve through complementary measures beyond energy access, such as climate-smart agriculture, disaster preparedness, emergency responsiveness, and institutional capacity building.
To support this effort, RMI and UNDP, as part of the Africa Minigrids Program (AMP), have launched a Climate Risk and Resilience Toolkit to help planners, developers, and stakeholders integrate climate resilience aspects into every stage of minigrid lifecycle for rural African communities.
Resilient Minigrids: A Blueprint for Adaptation and Development
The Toolkit offers a step-by-step, practical framework for designing and operating minigrids that can withstand and adapt to climate change. The toolkit includes a Resilience Assessment Framework which provides a simple, structured five-step framework to identify, anticipate, and adapt minigrid infrastructure to climate hazards through action-oriented recommendations across the project lifecycle.
By incorporating these steps into project planning, procurement and execution, and monitoring and evaluation, minigrid developers can identify resilience measures for specific climate hazards to improve minigrids’ ability to withstand climate extremes and continue serving communities when they’re needed most.
The toolkit also includes design and operational guidance, which provides site-specific measures for generation, storage, and distribution components. Procurement strategies that prioritize durable and adaptable technologies, as well as operation and maintenance plans that integrate early warning systems and emergency protocols, have been outlined in the toolkit. An illustrative list of climate hazards on solar PV panels and corresponding resilience measures is given in the table below:
To enhance rural community resilience to climate change, it is essential to build the capacity of local institutions and leaders by providing tailored climate education and awareness, enabling informed decision-making. Establishing community-based disaster response teams ensures proactive preparedness through training, emergency planning, and regular drills. Adopting climate-smart agriculture practices, such as crop rotation and drought-resistant crops, helps sustain agricultural productivity amid changing weather patterns, supporting livelihoods and minigrid viability. Finally, promoting water resource management through diversified water sources, storage solutions, green infrastructure, and advanced monitoring technologies optimizes water use, reducing vulnerability to floods and droughts while supporting both community needs and minigrid operations.
Learning from Real-World Projects
The toolkit features case studies from countries such as Nigeria, Mali, and India, demonstrating how integrated resilience measures ensure sustained power supply during climate disasters. For example, a minigrid in Bihar, a remote state in India, enabled Tara Urja, the minigrid operator, to continue to provide reliable electricity to homes and critical infrastructure during severe flooding that disrupted life for millions and overwhelmed local authorities. This reliable power was vital for coordinating relief work in the affected areas. This example highlights the effectiveness of climate-resilient minigrid systems in swiftly responding to climate change hazards.
Integrating climate resilience into minigrids raises capital and operational costs due to the need for greater reliability, redundancy, and robust infrastructure to withstand extreme weather. Preliminary findings from AMP’s ongoing Derisking Renewable Energy Investment (DREI) interviews show developers are already pricing the cost of resilience measures in the implementation of the projects by increasing end-user electricity tariffs. Minigrid developers must therefore balance these cost increases against the benefits of enhanced resilience.
A Call to Action: Invest in Resilient Minigrids
As climate threats intensify, climate-resilient minigrids are no longer an optional design consideration; they are essential to providing reliable and sustainable electricity, particularly in regions vulnerable to climate change impacts, while contributing to the socio-economic development of the communities they serve. Governments, donors, developers, and communities must collaborate to make minigrids, not only a clean energy solution, but also a resilient one. Additionally, stakeholders should work together to better understand how to cost-effectively integrate climate resilience measures into minigrid projects. By leveraging the guidance in the Toolkit, stakeholders can design climate-resilient minigrid systems that endure and empower.
Explore the Toolkit and learn how to build resilience into every electron of your minigrids.
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