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In many parts of Africa, the spread of grid electrical networks into rural areas has remained a pernicious challenge. There has been a persistent bias towards expanding electricity access to urban centres, perhaps understandably as they are the main drivers of national economic growth. In contrast, the expansion of grid electricity networks into rural areas is largely seen as being financially unviable and thus is unlikely to be achieved in the foreseeable future. Using the example of energy kiosks in Sierra Leone, this paper examines the potential commercial and policy implications of a social enterprise approach to address this impasse. Specifically, the success of the community charging station model of one non-governmental organization, Energy For Opportunity, is evaluated in the context of ongoing commercial viability, the overcoming of financial and technological barriers, and the lack of for-profit entities in the market. This case study demonstrates how an innovative blending of non-profit and for-profit models of development interventions can provide effective institutional arrangements to realize solar electrification in rural Africa.

In the late-1990s anthropologists James Fairhead and Melissa Leach declared in a series of seminal publications that mainstream understandings of Sierra Leonean forest cover history had greatly exaggerated its past extent and rate of conversion to other land uses. Using archival evidence, they recast the ‘official’ story as a product of antiquated European environmental philosophy rather than empirical data. Moreover, they found that it distorted environmental policy by perpetuating images of a mythological past in which once nearly universal forest cover had been (and continued to be) denuded and degraded by irrational, primitive rural agricultural practices. Building on this foundation, they developed a trenchant critique of the existing academic literature describing land cover change in Sierra Leone, discounting most findings on the grounds of the authors’ uncritical engagement with the colonial-era narrative. In this article we present a re-evaluation of this influential thesis, arguing that while their broader critique is quite sound, historical deforestation in Sierra Leone has most certainly been considerably exaggerated, Fairhead and Leach overreached in their dismissal of prior works. Drawing upon new empirical data, we revisit these debates and develop a more nuanced critical platform from which to understand Sierra Leone’s forest cover history.

<p>Supplementary Figure Legend. Legend for Supplementary Figures S1-S2.</p>