Prioritization of locations for off-grid rural electrification in Tanzania

The overall objective of this project is to prioritize locations for off-grid rural electrification in Tanzania. New datasets will be developed that will enable faster and more accurate market analysis for distributed energy services companies (DESCOs) operating in Tanzania, including household locations and indicators on ability to pay, potential for productive uses of electricity and up-to-date data on national electricity grid transmission and distribution line locations. Collectively, it is expected that these datasets will help DESCOs operating in, or seeking to enter, Tanzania to narrow down geographic areas that could be interesting markets for their off-grid energy services.

This objective will be achieved by a combination of remote sensing, GIS analyses and other data collection. These activities are complemented by stakeholder workshops and local capacity development.

The data for the analysis was downloaded form the following sources:

High Resolution Settlement Layer: (https://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/hrsl)

NBS GIS Open Data Portal for Region, District, Ward and Village shapefiles: (http://portal-nbs-tz.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/)

Global Horizontal Irradiance raster dataset: (http://globalsolaratlas.info/downloads/tanzania) Global Solar Atlas.

NBS GIS Open Data Portal: Number of healthsites and water sources dataset: (http://portal-nbs-tz.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/)

The processing steps for preparing the data for the prioritization are described with details and examples in this section.