Learning by Research

Her Thesis Title: Villages under pressure: maintaining solar mini-grids in Senegal and Kenya. Promises and accountability surrounding small-scale development infrastructures

The Illusion of Autonomous Technology

While the collapse of a bridge or the derailment of a train captures media attention, other infrastructure failures occur in relative silence. In Senegal for example, nearly half of village-scale solar mini-grids stop working just a few years after their installation. This situation is common across Sub-Saharan Africa: although these systems are designed to last twenty years, they often shut down before eight years. Why do these decentralized energy solutions, despite massive funding from international agencies, struggle to last?

"Chains of Promises and accountability" Put to the Test

Émilie’s thesis demonstrates that the survival of a mini-grid depends not only on its technical robustness, but also on the strength of the relationships between stakeholders: users, private operators, governments, and funding agencies. Through 156 interviews in Europe, Senegal and Kenya, her research analyzes these relationships as chains of promises and accountability. The balance is fragile: to be profitable, the operators rely on the promise of a local monopoly. However, the unforeseen extension of the national grid sometimes disrupt this economic isolation. Similarly, user behavior—consuming either "too much" or "too little" compared to the initial design assumptions—weakens both the infrastructure and its economic viability. Maintenance then becomes a stage for permanent compromise, where constraints often end up weighing on the most fragile links: rural populations and small operators.

Rethinking Engineering Through Temporality

Beyond its social findings, Émilie’s work directly challenges the field of engineering. It highlights the need to incorporate uncertainty and modularity from the design phase. Rather than designing sealed, static systems, the goal is to anticipate the natural degradation of components (batteries, inverters) and the unpredictable evolution of human needs. Maintaining is, above all, managing the constant tension between declining production capacity and increasing demand.

Interdisciplinarity: A Necessary Crossroad

Émilie’s research lies at the intersection of the sociology of technology and organizations, development economics, and engineering sciences. Co-supervised by a sociologist and an economist, her thesis mobilized direct collaborations with engineers to decrypt the physical tensions of the grids (load/production balance). This disciplinary hybridization made it possible to link the materiality of solar components to the political dynamics of international aid, proving that infrastructure longevity is an inseparable arrangement between the technical object and its socioeconomical organization.

Émilie took up the challenge of explaining her thesis in three minutes at the 2023 edition of the ‘Ma Thèse en 180 secondes’ competition.

Key words: accountability, maintenance, rural electrification, Africa, energy, mini-grids