By: Olufolahan Osunmuyiwa (Director of Partnerships, nLine) and Noah Klugman (CEO and Co-Founder, nLine). This article was originally published on the International Growth Centre’s blog here.
Poor power quality and reliability are major barriers to economic growth in Sierra Leone, where businesses depend on a stable electricity supply to stay productive. New data reveals the true extent of outages and spatial disparities across Freetown, highlighting how improving power supply could raise utility revenues, support capacity planning, and unlock investment.
In sub-Saharan Africa, a region that is home to 22 of the world’s low-income countries, access to affordable, reliable, and high-quality electricity remains elusive. For micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) – which generate 80% of the jobs in these economies – poor power quality and reliability (PQR) is not just an inconvenience; it stunts productivity and growth.
Why does poor power quality matter for economic growth?
The numbers reveal a stark reality: barely 45% of the population in low-income countries has access to grid electricity, and even for those with access, frequent outages and unstable voltage can hamper MSME output.
World Bank data shows more than 72% of MSMEs across sub-Saharan Africa face regular power disruptions that sap revenues and stall operations. Beyond its impact on MSMEs, poor PQR also significantly lowers utility revenues and erodes margins, compounding the financial fragility of national power systems.
Yet policymakers and investors face a blind spot. While surveys provide some evidence on the impact of poor PQR, real-time, high-resolution data showing the scale and nature of the challenge in low-income countries is virtually nonexistent. This is because collecting PQR data has historically been either prohibitively costly or technically complex. The result is that millions of small businesses remain invisible in energy planning, while governments and investors continue to prioritise new grid connections over service quality, sidelining a key metric that shapes economic performance.
Gathering data on power quality and reliability in Sierra Leone
To begin to fill these data gaps, we conducted a study in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to quantify the effects of poor PQR on MSME productivity and utility sustainability. We leveraged nLine’s GridWatch suite – a remote monitoring tool that supports grid quality and performance auditing by combining quickly deployable wall outlet sensors with cloud algorithms to aggregate sensor measurements into key performance indicators (KPIs) on grid reliability and quality.
GridWatch sensors were deployed in 48 businesses connected to 12 transformers across Freetown. Over a nine-month period, from November 2024 to July 2025, the devices captured granular data on outages, voltage quality, and frequency. Using machine-learning models grounded in power systems, these sensor-collected measurements were transformed into PQR KPIs, offering a rare, data-driven view of electricity quality in Freetown.
What does real-time electricity data reveal about service quality?
Sierra Leone's per capita electricity consumption is one of the lowest in the world – but this is not necessarily due to a lack of demand; rather, as our data reveals, it is due to structural limitations in the supply of electricity. For instance, we found that on some days, outages dominated the most productive hours of the workday (8am to 6pm), and MSMEs within our sample were constrained in their ability to use electricity productively.
Power outages across Freetown are spatially uneven
MSMEs within our sample experienced a total of 6,195 outage interruptions over nine months. The spatial disparities were striking: MSMEs in eastern Freetown experienced nearly seven times more outage hours than those in the relatively affluent western Freetown. These businesses experienced an average of 300 hours of outages per month – that is, they were without electricity for roughly 40% of the month.
In addition to having fewer productive hours, MSMEs reported reduced efficiency of appliances and equipment, and even damage due to frequent voltage sags and spikes, resulting in replacement costs of hundreds of dollars.
Utility providers also face losses from interruptions in power supply
While recorded power consumption remains low, it does not reflect the true level of latent demand. For the Electricity Distribution and Supply Authority (EDSA), the national electricity provider in Sierra Leone, the cost of unserved energy is significant. For example, a business that uses 20 kWh of electricity per day would have an average hourly use of 0.833 kWh.
With an average of 300 hours of power outages per month, the amount of unserved energy is 250 kWh per business per month – suppressed demand that never appears on the utility provider’s revenue books. Suppressed demand from outages of this scale masks the true size of the electricity market, complicates systems planning, and makes the sector less profitable than it could be. This ultimately discourages investors from providing the financing needed for grid modernisation.
How can MSMEs and utilities benefit from improved power quality?
If supply constraints were removed and PQR significantly improved, actual electricity demand from MSMEs could far exceed official forecasts – increasing the scope for forward-looking capacity planning. This would also unlock a multiplier effect in Freetown and, by extension, Sierra Leone as a whole: higher per capita consumption and improved MSME productivity would lead to a growth in formal sector employment, and ultimately, higher GDP.
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of the broader PQR challenges across sub-Saharan Africa. Our work in the region suggests that, if PQR issues remain unaddressed, utility providers risk undercomputing demand, investors risk underestimating market potential, and governments risk stalling growth.