Privation électrique et disposition à payer des ménages urbains pour un micro-réseau solaire prépayé : évidence empirique issue de six communes de Kinshasa (République démocratique du Congo)

Abstract

This article measures the intensity of electricity deprivation and the willingness to pay (WTP) for a prepaid solar mini-grid among urban households in Kinshasa, the largest French-speaking city in the world, where the national access rate stood at only 21.5% in 2024. A contingent-valuation survey administered online and face-to-face collected 659 valid household responses in twelve neighbourhoods of six communes (Lemba, Limete, Masina, Mont-Ngafula, Ndjili and Selembao) selected through a documentary mapping of chronic outage zones. Results are unequivocal. Deprivation is not marginal but structural: 53.1% of households endure outages exceeding six hours per day, 27.3% between four and six hours, and short interruptions are virtually non-existent; one third of households (33.2%) hold no meter at all, which places them outside any contractual relationship with the incumbent utility. Coping strategies are costly and hazardous rather than absent: external device charging (24.9%), candles and kerosene lamps, and combined candle-generator use (23.5%). Stated interest in a reliable and affordable solar solution reaches 100% of respondents, and 61.5% of the sample concentrates its WTP between USD 15 and USD 30 per month, yielding a reconstructed conditional mean of USD 22.04. The decisive empirical finding is a tariff gap: the USD 35 flat rate assumed in the reference business plan exceeds the reconstructed mean WTP by 58.8%, which means that household WTP falls 37% short of the projected tariff, so that commercial viability rests less on solar technology than on tariff engineering, collection discipline and connection density. We derive a demand-side strategic management framework in which affordability, not generation capacity, is the binding constraint of decentralised urban electrification in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.