Power to the People

We’re finding rural homes so that we can get everyone in the world electrical access.

Electricity can improve quality of life and reduce poverty. Electric lighting, devices, and appliances have cross-cutting benefits in education, healthcare, poverty alleviation, and gender equality.

To get people electrical access, you need to know where they live. Most people who lack electricity live in poor rural areas which may not have accurate census data. This makes grid design difficult and time-consuming.

Since it would take way too long to map everyone by eye, we’re training computers to do it. By identifying buildings in satellite imagery of sub-Saharan Africa, you’re teaching our algorithms what rural homes look like. This helps us locate folks more accurately and design smart electrical systems to meet their needs.

The dataset of rural homes and the tools we are building will be made available to electrical researchers and developers. Organisations like the World Bank and the United Nations have used similar technologies to plan electrification; we aim to add to these with home-level data, enabling more detailed and community-specific grid design.

Power to the People is part of the GeoDESA project conducted by the University of Oxford, Satellite Applications Catapult, and Earth-I.