nKIGALI, Rwanda— The Electricity, Water and Sanitation Authority (EWSA) is scrapping monthly charges on cash power as one way of bringing electricity to almost the whole country.
To load cash power a person had to first pay Rwf500 (almost $1) per month for the prepayment meter.
This has been a cause of widespread complaint among some sections of the public.
“This is a follow up on the last year’s 2012 National Dialogue’s proposal which was based on revising electricity charges hence make it easy for the people to access”, Lucien Ruterana the EWSA strategic director told East African Business Week.
“After consultation with the different EWSA stakeholders and based on the facilitation to access and also use electricity to all people both in rural and urban areas, we decided to remove the monthly charges,” Ntare Karitanyi, EWSA Director General, said.
“We believe that with this new strategy will help meet the country’s plan of connecting about 70% of the household to electricity by the year 2017 will be met,” Karitanyi said.
EWSA’s split into two companies was recently approved by the Cabinet.
This is expected to help the EWSA manage energy and water resources easily.
Ruterana siad, “The percentage of people both in rural and urban areas with electricity is about 17%.”
There will be an automatic increase to the 70% targeted number of households with electricity by the year 2018 because of the different other policies developed which include the Rural Electrification Programme aimed at increasing access to electricity, the use of solar and biogas among others.
Officials say the new policies will improve overall service delivery.
