Entrepreneurial infrastructure, genders and sexualities in the off-grid city: water and energy entrepreneurship in Nigeria and South Africa entreprene

In the contemporary African city, businesses and residents across all income groups access infrastructure through bricolage strategies that mix grid and off-grid services, particularly in accessing water and energy. This hybrid infrastructure is attributed to multiple factors including: patchy provision of networked services in post-colonial cities; poor quality and service-disruption connected to weak governance, climate change and natural resource limitations (e.g. drought, depletion of coal reserves); high tariffs (often as a cost recovery strategy); alongside drives towards sustainable 'green' technologies.

Recent scholarship within urban geography acknowledges the 'myth' of the centralised model of universal service-provision in the global South (e.g. Jaglin 2015, Coutard and Rutherford 2016), demonstrating heterogenous infrastructure consumption and provision as a more accurate reflection of global South urban realities (e.g. Monstadt and Schramm 2017, Lawhon et al. 2018, Lemanski 2019). However, this emerging scholarship ignores the entrepreneurial activities of small- and large-scale commercial entities in providing off-grid forms of infrastructure that range from water sachets/canteens and small solar generators sold on the streets, to water tanks, boreholes, solar panels and diesel generators installed in (typically wealthy) residential and commercial zones.

However, there is increasing interest in these issues in business studies and development economics. For instance, academics in business are increasingly interested in how such entrepreneurs manage to provide quality services at highly affordable prices in financially viable ways, despite the considerable odds they face (see Prabhu 2017, Radjou et al. 2012). Meanwhile, development economists are increasingly interested in how urban entrepreneurs negotiate the boundaries between formal and informal economic activity in Africa and Asia (see Banerjee and Duflo 2011). Opportunities therefore exist to integrate insights and approaches from business and economics with urban geography.

The studentship will address the following:

1. What are the motivations and practices of water and energy off-grid entrepreneurs in Accra (Ghana) and Johannesburg (South Africa); and how does this differ according to a) business scale (e.g. from street sellers to large commercial entities, and b) location within the city?

2. How do entrepreneurs navigate the formal/informal economy, and interact with other stakeholders (consumers, other entrepreneurs, the state)?

3. What is the role of the state in regulating the activities of entrepreneurs who exist primarily due to the failures of the state in infrastructure provision? In what ways does the state inhibit/discipline or promote/support entrepreneurship?

4. How is entrepreneurship in the off-grid water and energy sector understood within global economic development narratives that position sustainable infrastructure as increasingly decentralised and small-scale?

5. How can entrepreneurship be re-theorised from an inter-disciplinary perspective?

The student will undertake fieldwork in Accra and Johannesburg, conducting qualitative semi-structured interviews with off-grid water and energy entrepreneurs as well as state officials responsible for regulating these industries. While in the field, the student will be supported by colleagues at the University of Ghana (Prof George Owusu) and University of Witwatersrand (Dr Margot Rubin), who will integrate the student into academic, policy and practice networks of urban infrastructure and entrepreneurship.