Zambia's Refugee Electrification: Grid Extension as Displacement Justice

In September 2026, Zambia's Rural Electrification Authority (REA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees renewed a partnership to electrify three refugee settlements: Meheba in the North-Western Province, Mayukwayukwa in the Western Province, and Mantapala in Luapula.^[1] The news arrived as a quiet institutional milestone, but it marks a shift in how displacement is being managed in the global South: not as charity, but as infrastructure that binds refugees and host communities into a single grid.

The Meheba Phase I project, completed under the earlier 2023-2025 memorandum of understanding, extended 28.268 kilometres of 33-kilovolt overhead lines and 10.909 kilometres of 400-volt distribution networks to Meheba A, Meheba B, and Kananga.^[1] The build cost K16.26 million (about $780 USD at current rates), and by technical commissioning, more than 30 connections had been completed.^[1] The real leverage came after: REA's Last Mile connection fee subsidy programme reduced the connection fee from K4,846 (about $233 USD) to K300 (about $14 USD).^[1] As of mid-September 2026, more than 120 applications had been captured and more than 50 beneficiaries had been connected under the subsidy.^[1]

The stakes are material. Electrification unlocks refrigeration for health clinics, lighting for schools, and the possibility of small enterprise, phone charging, welding, cold storage for agricultural surplus. In Meheba, the project was designed to benefit more than 300 households, businesses, and social facilities, including schools, rural health centres, a police post, and St Mary's Mission.^[1] But the mechanism that matters is the subsidy itself. A K4,846 connection fee is one-tenth of average annual household income in a refugee settlement; K300 is affordable. The REA modelled the bridge: public capital covers the grid, subsidies close the affordability gap, and uptake becomes the metric.

The renewed partnership now extends this logic across three settlements and formalises UNHCR's role as co-funder and technical partner. Under the new memorandum of understanding, REA will provide technical support on pre-feasibility studies, feasibility assessments, and project design.^[1] The institutions will assess opportunities to electrify Mayukwayukwa and Mantapala, beginning with the same model: grid extension, then subsidised connection.

What Zambia is demonstrating, at modest scale, is that refugee electrification is not a separate track from rural electrification. It is rural electrification with explicit equity rules. The host community gets the same grid; the displaced household gets the subsidy bridge. The lesson travels: in the global South, where grid extension is the binding constraint and refugee populations often cluster in underserved areas, treating refugees as a spur to broader electrification (rather than as a cost to minimise) aligns incentive and outcome. The mechanism, capital from government, subsidy from humanitarian agency, technical oversight from the utility, is replicable and is being tested here at the scale where it will either root or fail.