Social Life of Energy in

Kampala, U ganda Policy and Practice

Wendel Iwema

Master Thesis International Development Studies, Rural Development Sociology Student: Wendel Iwema Student number: 850509-383-100 Supervisors: Michiel Kohne and Paul Hebinck

Table of Contents

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………………..3

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………….….4

Chapter 1 Theory ……………………………………………………………………………………..…6

The Social Life of Things and Understanding their Politics …………………………..…7 The Actor Oriented Approach ………………………………………………………….………..8 Thesis ……………………………………………………………………………………………….….11 Policy Theory ………………………………………………………………………………………..12 Theoretical Approach ……………………………………………………………………………..13 Methods and Techniques …………………………………………………………………………15

Chapter 2 Energy Policy ……………………………………………………………………….…..17

A Short History of Ruling Powers, Policy Processes, and Energy ……………………17 Energy Policies Nowadays ……………………………………………………………………….19 Energy Actors ……………………………………………………………………………………….25 Analysis ………………………………………………………………………………………………..41

Chapter 3 Social Life of Energy in the Slums of Kampala ……………………….44

Actors in the Slums of Kampala ……………………………………………………………….44 Charcoal Sellers, Stove Sellers and Manufacturers, and Energy Sellers …………..48 Energy in the Slums ……………………………………………………………………………….53 Health and Environment ………………………………………………………………………...54 Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………………………….55

Chapter 4 Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………………58

Social Field of the Government ………………………………………………………………..58 Social Field of the Germans ……………………………………………………………….……59 Social Field of Small Local Organisations and an Italian Stove Builder ……….….59 Social Field of the Slums ………………………………………………………………………...60 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………………...61

Literature …………………………………………………………………………………………………63

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List of Figures

Figure 1. World of actors ………………………………………………………………………14 Figure 2. Multiple Realities Through Actor Oriented Approach ……………………...15 Figure 3. Reality………………………………………………………………………………….15 Figure 4. Clay stoves in Kisenyi……………………………………………………………...51 Figure 5. Metal stoves in a house in Kampala…………………………………………..…51 Figure 6. Electric cooking device……………………………………………………….……52 Figure 7. View over Kisenyi I………………………………………………………………...52 Figure 8. One of the slums kitchens………………………………………………………....54 Figure 9. Another kitchen……………………………………………………………………...54 Figure 10. Map of Uganda…………………………………………………………………….67

3 Introduction

Everyone uses energy but the way in which energy is used, the feeling that people have with energy, and the value that people give to energy can be very different, although the physical thing is the same. For example, in the Netherlands charcoal, a type of energy, is used during warm summer nights to light the barbecue and enjoy some meat with family or friends. It is almost a luxury. In Uganda charcoal is used every day, by everyone to lighten their stoves and cook their daily meals. Charcoal is a necessity. Something that we, in the West, associate with luxury and cosiness can have a different value in the context of Uganda. People give different meanings and values to commodities that look the same and are able to do the same, because of the context they live in. The differences in value and meaning of commodities are also visible within Uganda. This thesis discusses the meanings and values of energy and the interfaces that are a consequence of these differences. One of these interfaces shows itself when the energy policy process and the energy use in the slums of Kampala are discussed. In order to understand the process of value giving to a product/thing/commodity, we first need to understand how value giving works and why this process works in a certain way and where it happens. Only after this understanding research in the field is possible. Chapter 1 discusses the theories of Arjun Appadurai, Igor Kopytoff, Norman Long and Rosemary McGee. All of them have address the question of how social processes work. Appadurai and Kopytoff delve into the social life of things since they believe that a thing does not only have an economic value but also have a social value that influence the use of a thing or the non-use of a thing in a social arena. A thing needs to meet the commodity requirements that are set by the social arena they are in, before they can call themselves a commodity. Igor Kopytoff adds that this social life, the social and cultural biography of a thing, shows us the structure and cultural resources of a society. Norman Long discusses this further; he explains how this social life on the one hand is structured through realities of actors and how this social life on the other hand structures the realities of actors in social arenas. These realities are constructed of different understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories. The places where these different realities and thus different ways of knowing the world meet are called ‘battlefields of knowledge’ by Long. This moment is called an interface, a moment when social arenas or social systems meet. These interfaces show where the differences in understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories exist and how they differ. This thesis discusses two of these social arenas: ‘the energy policy process of Uganda’ and ‘the energy in the slums of Kampala’.

4 To understand the policy process I have read the theory of Rosemary McGee. She unpacks the context in which the interaction of the policy process exists and she explains how this knowledge of this interaction can be helpful in research. She distinguishes three layers of a cake: knowledge, actors, and space. These are influenced by and influence power, culture, political economy, and knowledge. Because she takes a vertical slice of this cake, she can address all the different influences and factors of the policy process instead of seeing as a linear process. I have combined this theory with the theories of Long, Appadurai, and Kopytoff and developed a approach that makes it possible to develop a holistic picture of the two social arenas and their ‘battlefields of knowledge’ and ‘interfaces’. Chapter two and three describe the different social field through the theory, by addressing the different actors that are active in the social fields. Chapter two discusses ‘the energy policy process’ arena, and discusses actors of the government, NGO’s and private companies with their understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories. It focuses on who the actors in the policy process are and what their discourse of energy is and of policy in Uganda. Further a short history of energy policy is given to address the history aspect that McGee brought to attention, since this history is influencing the policy targets at the moment. Chapter three does the same for the slums of Kampala. I have interviewed several slum inhabitants about their energy use, their knowledge and meaning of energy, and their other interests and struggles in life. Those slum inhabitants were, sometimes, also energy sellers, stove sellers, or NGO worker. In chapter four the two social fields are brought together and the differences in realities are discusses as well as the consequences. Goal is to explain the interfaces and their backgrounds and reasons of existing. The discussion of these interfaces might help policy makers and slum inhabitants to understand each other’s realities and to discuss these. This can eventually help to find solutions for problems that are caused by these differences and to make those arenas better connect.

5 Chapter 1 Theory

To understand the meaning and value of energy and to make this meaning and value researchable, is only possible when one understands how things like energy acquire meaning and value in a certain context. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes the process of value giving and value obtaining by discussing the social life of a thing. (Appadurai, 1986) He explains that, for example charcoal is not by definition a commodity, but that this thing needs to obtain this commodity status by meeting the criteria that its social context has set for a thing, before it could be called a commodity. Igor Kopytoff (1986) calls this process of status generation the ‘cultural biography’ of a thing. Through the study of this ‘cultural biography’ the structures and resources of a social context become clear. The value of a thing can be explained by its ‘cultural biography’ and by its ‘social life’. These theories of Appadurai and Kopytoff are further explained in this chapter. The theory of Norman Long are also described in this chapters, because it clarifies how actors and their realities influence each other and their social arenas, where these things exist in. The place where these different realities of actors and of social arenas meet each other are called ‘battlefields of knowledge’. These ‘battlefields of knowledge’ make it possible to show the differences between the realities and the struggles; ‘interfaces’. Also the policy tool of Rosemary McGee is discussed in this chapter in order to understand the energy policy process. To answer questions about value shaping in a policy process in Uganda, it should first be clear what the policy process and where the policy process can take place. McGee ‘unpacked’ the policy process and concluded that this process is one of interaction. This interaction takes place between and within actors, knowledge, and spaces, which are influenced by power, history, culture and political economic factors. These theories actually lie close together, so at the end of this chapter I will combine them to get one approach in researching social arenas. The social arenas are partly defined in this chapter, but as will become clear in this chapter, only analysis of the social arenas makes it possible to demarcate them more precisely. These theories are on the one hand the way of analysing my data, but on the other hand they were also the guidelines through which I conducted my research in Uganda. Although this chapter is created to discuss theory on social research, it is also a discussion on research methods in social research.

6 The Social Life of Things and Understanding their Politics The circulation of commodities is not only studied by economist, whose interest is mainly the money value of commodities. Sociologists and anthropologists also took an interest in this subject but focused on the social and cultural aspects. Famous examples are Bronislaw Malinowski (1921) and Arjun Appadurai (1986). They have a different perspective that looks into the social life of commodities and the cultural biography of things. Malinowski is one of the first well know anthropologist who described an exchange system of valuables that could not be compared with the exchange system known in Europe and The United States. His way of studying the exchange system was new since it did not look at money value but had a focus on other types of value. The circulation of valuables of the Trobrianders, he described, was not based on money value of objects, but on the story-value, reputation of the owner-value, and of the spells-value. Social processes where thus responsible for the value of objects that were exchanged. He developed a different perspective that looked at the social life of subjects and their social and cultural life. He showed that the value of a product is not always related to money only, but can have more sources of value. These social processes are also described by Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff in the book “The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective’. (1986) Appadurai argues in the introduction of that book that the circulation of commodities and their value is linked through politics because actors can manipulate the cultural definitions of objects and they can manipulate the circulation by strategic diversions. Appadurai calls these social processes of value given by cultural definitions and diversions ‘politics’. What he thus argues is that commodities need to have a value in order to be exchangeable. A thing is not by definition a commodity although it has value. They need to meet, to quote Appadurai, ‘the requirements of a commodity candidacy’. (Appadurai, 1986, pp. 16) This candidacy differs in each context and is dependable of standards and criteria that are defined in social arenas and cultural units. These processes, or politics, around a thinking change and therefore a thing can move into and out of a commodity phase. Igor Kopytoff gives a very good example of this movement into and out of commodity candidacy when he describes the career of a slave. A slave begins his career as a commodity during his capturing when he is withdrawn from his social setting, he commoditize and is sold and get a new social identity as slave in a new social setting. Here he becomes less of a commodity and creates an identity in the host society. (Kopytoff, 1986, pp. 65) This might be a cruel example, but it shows not only how things can go into and out of a commodity phase, it also shows that not only things but also living creatures like humans and animals can become a commodity or can decommoditize. Things, dead or living, have a biography and according to Kopytoff this biography is culturally shaped. The question you have to ask about things, according to him, is; ‘what, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities realized? (Kopytoff, 1986, pp. 66)

7 Thus by looking at the cultural/sociological biography of a thing one can understand the circulation of commodities better. It becomes clear how its value is created and what choices are made during the process of commoditization and exchange. The classification, as Kopytoff call this process, ‘reflects the structure and the cultural resources of the society in question’. (Kopytoff, 1986, pp. 70) By approaching an object through the study of its commoditization and circulation it is possible to see the structure and the cultural resources of a society. The value given to a thing depends on its, and is explained by its cultural biography. The processes that create this biography are called politics. These politics are responsible for the commodity candidacy of a thing. Things have become a commodity somewhere during their career as things. They have been given a value and met the criteria and standards in a certain social context that made them commodity candidates. They have been, will be, or are a part of the circulation of commodities in a certain social setting. The question then is what kind of value does a commodity has and how did it obtain this? And why did it obtain this value, and can this value change or is it possible to change its commodity status, and if yes, how can you change its status? In other words; what are the politics of a certain thing?

Translating this theory into research practice means asking the question; What are the politics behind energy? How does energy in Uganda get its value and why does it get a certain value? How does the circulation of energy looks like and when does it gets a commodity status and why? In line with the theory of Appadurai and Kopytoff, the research in Uganda looked into the politics of energy. Since the focus of the research was the slums of Kampala, the capital of the country, the main type of energy that was researched was cooking energy. The research focuses thus on the value generation, commodity criteria, and social and cultural biography of cooking energy in the slums of Kampala. But there are more contexts than one where a thing gets its value. Appadurai and Kopytoff do not go further than arguing that a thing has a social life and a social and cultural biography, which are defined by the politics in that social setting. Norman Long takes a step further by not defining but problemetizes the conclusion of Appadurai and Kopytoff. He looks at the actors that are responsible for the politics that Appadurai and Kopytoff have defined.

The Actor-Oriented Approach The actor-oriented approach of Norman Long was originally created for development issues, although the approach applies to a lot more arenas than only the development arena. He has developed an approach based on a social-constructionist form of analyses (Long, 2001), which involves all actors and their worldviews concerned within a social area of research.

8 Social-constructionists believe that society can be made and remade by the choices of the actors in society; the laws of nature then do not make society. He uses this approach to look at social interfaces and development issues and to discuss battlefields of knowledge. A social interface is a moment at which social systems and social fields/levels intersect. At that moment structural discontinuities based on different values and social interests become clear. Long has written and edited several works concerning the actor-oriented approach that together give a comprehensive understanding on how he thinks researchers should approach social or development research. The basis of the actor-oriented approach is to see a subject as knowing and active in social fields while interacting with others. (Long, 1989) The approach looks at individual actions and choices and strategies of actors, but it also focuses on the moment of interaction of these actions, choices and strategies. Norman Long calls this moment, where social systems and social fields and levels intersect, a ‘social interface’. He argues that at the moment of intersections the ‘structural discontinuities’ that are based on differences in values and social interests of actions become clear. (Long, 1989) Arguing this means that actors construct social fields but are also themselves socially constructed by their environment and the discourses available to them. (Long 1992) What then is created are ‘multiple realities’; different realities constructed by different actors that can meet each other, which can cause structural discontinuities. (Long, 1989, 1992, 2004)

The concept that Long uses as a central concept in his book in 1992 is ‘battlefields of knowledge’, which he later explains as the fields where social actions take place and where several actors with different understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories are active. (Long, 2004) Thus it is the place where multiple realities meet and where battles over resources, meanings, institutional legitimacy and control are fought. This is the place where social interfaces take place. Unlike structural analysis of social fields, this approach does not only look at external factors, but it incorporates also the internal factors that create a social reality, or better in this case, multiple realities. Long argues that one of the advantages of this approach is ‘that one begins with an interest in explaining differential responses to similar structural circumstances’. (Long, 1992, pp. 21) When you look at the responses, the different actors in a social field become clear. These circumstances are patterns developed out of interactions, negotiations, and social struggles between different actors in the field. When the theory of Long is applied to the research in Uganda, it means that the research will look at the multiple realities that are created around energy in Uganda. The ‘battlefields of knowledge’ of Long will be researched and the understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories of all actors active in the fields will be explicated. With this theory it

9 is possible to answer the questions on which patterns are developed out of the interactions, negotiations, and social struggles in the energy field. To quote Long: ‘we should encompass not only everyday social practice and language games, but also larger-scale institutional frameworks, resource fields, networks of communication and support, collective ideologies, socio-political arena’s of struggle and the beliefs and cosmologies that may shape actors’ improvisations, coping behaviors and planned actions. (Long, 2001, pp. 3)

But most important of this approach, especially for this research is the look inside the reasons for interfaces as well as the place of the interface. This is important, because if we know where and why and how interfaces arise, in the context of energy in the slums of Kampala, we might be able to influence the interfaces in a way that has a positive outcome for all actors. It must be said that the term ‘interface’ is not per definition a negative term, since it is only the moment were different ideas, worldviews, interests, etc. meet and where these difference are better noticed than otherwise. But as history has shown, differences can also create negative consequences and therefore it is important to catch those differences before the negative consequences arrive and create new possibilities.

I will combine the idea of the ‘Social Life of Things’ of Arjun Appadurai And Igor Kopytoff with the idea of ‘multiple realities’, ‘battlefields of knowledge’ and ‘interfaces’ of Norman Long in this thesis because it is the best way to explore the complexity of the biography of a thing is a specific society. It is also the best way to explore the reasons for interfaces within a society because of its holistic approach. This approach gives a researcher the opportunity to look at multiple factors at once. This is important because a society is complex and so are its problems therefore the problems in society are often not explained by one factor but rather by many. The possibilities of a thing are partly given by nature, since it has certain material possibilities and limitations (creating gold from wood is most likely not possible for example). But actors and their social settings that have given the thing a value and sometimes have given it a commodity status because it applied to the standards and criteria in a certain social setting of those actors create mostly the possibilities and limitations. This social setting and its standards and criteria is, as Long calls it, a reality. But as Long also argues, there is not just one reality in this social setting. The social setting is created through several multiple realities. This social setting with its multiple realities develops several standards and criteria at the same time that might not be the same. Because of this social mechanism, the same thing can be, in the same social setting, for one actor a commodity and for the other a non-commodity. Or different actors all can give a thing the commodity status, but give it this name based on different standards and criteria and give it a different value, while living in the same social setting or acting in the same social setting. When these different actors with their different worldviews, standards, criteria, values, believes and multiple realities meet we can define this as ‘battlefields of knowledge’. At this point it could become

10 clear that the commodity in question does not have the same social value for all the actors. This is the moment when the interfaces become clear.

In my view there is an interface or there are more interfaces visual when studying the household energy sector, the energy policy and the energy use in the slums of Kampala. The value given to the commodity energy differs in the different social settings and within the different social settings. There are several ‘battlefields of knowledge’ and realities that can be defined; these will be defined in chapter three and four. Due to these different fields, multiple realities and social settings, the interfaces are at some point problematic for the success of the energy policy of Uganda. What these interfaces are and how they manifest themselves will be outlined in chapter five.

Thesis The problem is that it has been difficult for the Ugandan government to implement its energy plans for the slums of Kampala and the other cities of Uganda. I argue that this difficulty arises because the realities of the actors in the energy policy field differ. This creates an interface. The question answered in this thesis is: How do interfaces in the context of Ugandan energy policy and the energy use in the slums of Kampala manifest themselves? Behind this question are many sub questions that need to be answered.  Which different ‘battlefields of knowledge’ can be defined in the context of energy policy for the slums of Kampala?  What are the social settings of these battlefields?  Which actors are active in these battlefields and what kind of roles do they play in the energy setting?  What are the different understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories of the actors that are active in the battlefields?  What are the multiple realities of energy?  How do these realities overlap and differ and why do they overlap or differ?  What are the consequences of these overlaps and differences of these realities and thus of the battlefields? The answers of these questions will create a holistic view of the slum energy situation in Kampala and will explain how interfaces manifest themselves in these arenas. One of these arenas that will be discussed is the policy arena of the energy policy of Uganda. Since policy is a very complex concept, I used Rosemary McGee’s ‘Unpacking Policy’ because she unpacks policy in a very clear way that makes it much more easy to research this field.

11

Policy Theory As stated above, I will use Rosemary McGee because she unpacks policy in a way that is very useful and holistic. Besides this holistic advantage of this approach, the approach also is closely related to the ‘battlefields of knowledge’ that Long uses and his actor-oriented approach and multiple realities. The most important observation of Rosemary McGee is that policy is not a linear approach. She lies ‘more emphasis on the range of levels spanned by policy, envisaging it as stretching from the uppermost levels of governance to the lowest’. (McGee, 2004, pp. 8) Policy is the ‘formulation, implementation, and the dynamics and patterns that surround it’. (McGee, 2004, pp. 1) In order to create a conceptual framework that can be used in any policy context, she created one that was descriptive and analytical because she takes a vertical slice of the process. By doing this she argues that she does not miss any aspect of the process. The slice is divided in three sectors; actors, knowledge, and spaces. Actors are ‘all those located up and down the vertical slice, in government or outside it, who have some role in the policy process’. (McGee, 2005, pp. 9) All those different actors are part of a network and are embedded in a certain social context, or as Long calls them, social fields. What becomes clear with McGee and less in the theory of Long, is that those actors can be active in different social fields of the slice and could thus also be part of more that one reality that exist in the slice.

McGee gives a clear example of differences in knowing. During the policy process, people that often have no experience knowledge, which means that they have not experienced the situation, write the written policy for the poor. They gained their knowledge through articles, presentations or courses. Besides differences in they way of knowing, there are also different ways of knowledge: industrially produced knowledge and constructed knowledge. ‘The first is knowledge that is especially produced by certain actors for certain kinds of users’. ‘The second kind of knowledge is knowledge that is constructed by a range of actors, through processes very different from the production of the first kind of data and to different ends’. (McGee, 2004, pp. 12) This second kind of knowledge is, among more, experiential knowledge. These kind of knowledges are often less visible because the industrially produced one is often written down in data, articles or researches. But it does not mean that one of the two is more true that the other by definition. Experiential knowledge or constructed knowledge can be created through narratives, these are stories that can have interesting information, but they are still stories. They also create the discourse in question. The point, I think, McGee wants to make, is that there are several kinds of ways in which people know and with her approach, all these ways of knowing get the attention they need. If we connect this to Long, I think we can say that knowledge creates, in combination with other aspects, reality and that we have multiple realities because we have multiple knowledges.

12 The third part of the slice is space. She uses this term to break the process down in observable and influenceable parts, this is done by dividing space in five dimensions that also make it possible to see multiple times and places of the process. The five dimensions are history, access, mechanics, dynamics, and learning. History looks into the creation of the policy space and answers questions like; who creates the policy space and how is the policy space created. Access looks at who can enter the space, who cannot and who decides who can and cannot. Mechanics defines who does what and what happens, it also looks more into the physical context. The dynamics dimension explains the relation of power, past and relations and sets out the rules of space. The dimension learning gives the opportunity to look into the experience of the actors and how they transformed after learning. Not every space has a learning dimension; this depends on the other dimensions, since there are certain circumstances necessary for learning.

The policy process exists of knowledge, actors and spaces, those sectors are, in turn, influenced by power, history, culture and the political economy. All these aspects together are called the ‘context of interaction’. In the next chapter and the one after that, this ‘context of interaction’ is unpacked. It will become clear which spaces are important for the energy policy process of Uganda as well as which actors have a role or don’t have a role in the policy process.

Approach There are some overlapping terms in the discussed theories of Appadurai, Kopytoff, Long and McGee. I have combined and visualized the theories to make the approach I take for my research and for this thesis clearer. The first figure shows the world of actors. The actors with their own realities are the blue circles; the orange circle is the world of all actors together and thus the world of all realities together. The black circles are the social arenas in which the actors move/live/act/think/know etc. These social arenas can almost be everything; it mainly depends on the researcher to give a definition of what belongs to the social arena and what not. Often social arenas overlap just like the realities of actors overlap. These social arenas are shaped by the realities of the actors that act in the Figure 1 World of Actors social fields, but the social arenas they act in also shape the actors’ realities.

13 The second figure shows two of the social arenas I selected and named for my research; the ‘Energy Policy Process’ social arena and the ‘slums of Kampala’ social arena. In real life these social arenas are probably not nice round circles, they will be a bit messy and unclear. It might be possible to find more than once social arena within the context I will be Figure 2 Multiple Realities Through Actor Oriented looking for. It is possible that the ‘slums of Kampala’ Approach social arena exists of several arenas because there are several slums in Kampala who do not belong to the same arena since they have different realities. The third figure shows the social processes or politics that given meaning to things in the life of the actors and in the social arenas. Here we find structures, cultural resources, knowledges, powers, history, political economies, and spaces and probably a lot more. These factors influence social arenas and are influenced by social arenas but they also influence actors Figure 3 Reality realities and are influenced by actors realities. The places where the circles overlap (blue and black), are the places/spaces of the ‘battlefields of knowledge’; the places where different realities meet. These are also the places/spaces where interfaces are shown; where social systems and social fields meet. This is also the way in which I will describe my research and the way I conducted my research, although I will start with the last picture, describing the actors realities and roughly the social arenas with the factors that influence and are influenced by the actors realities and social arenas. This approach makes it possible to start with the exploration of the social arenas together with choosing actors that are relevant in these arenas. The actors can create a smaller of bigger arena by their information. The surrounding factors become clear while discussing the realities with the actors. After this a description of the realities of these arenas is possible together with the definition of the ‘battlefields of knowledge’ and the ‘interfaces’. The first arena I discuss it the ‘Energy Policy Process’ arena with actors and factors, next I will do the same for the ‘Slums of Kampala’ arena. In the analysis will become clear where the arena and the realities overlap, what the battlefields are and what the interfaces are.

14 Methods and Techniques One of the first things I learned about social research is that no one is totally objective, you can only try to be as objective as possible with the help of methods and techniques. One of the most important steps to take in research is to explain the choices you have made within your research and the consequences they bring. ‘Social research is influenced by a variety of factors’. (Bryman, 2004, pp. 21) Alan Bryman (2004) describes the following factors; theory, values, practical considerations, epistemology, ontology. I have already discussed why I used my theory and in this discussion became clear that I approach the subject of social science; ‘people and their institutions’ (Bryman, 2004, pp. 13) as they are different from the subjects of natural science. Because in my opinion people and institutions cannot be caught in standard rules that rule everywhere. Long argues that institutions are constructed by the realities of the actors and that institutions are influencing the realities of these actors, he and I do not believe that institutions are given and are external to the world of actors. These values that I share with Long and of course with McGee and Kopytoff, have influenced the choice of my research area. I have chosen to start of with a very broad research area and to narrow it during my research because the boundaries of this area were not visible at the beginning of the research. This also meant that the research questions were in the beginning much broader than at the end of the research. Most of the interviews I declined were open interviews, where I had some items that I wanted to discuss and to which I came back to during the interview, but actors were free to discuss any subject they thought was related to my research. Since I started with a German organization my research was, especially in the beginning focused on their network. I tried to limit this biased network with the snowball sampling technique. Besides interviews, I also used the Internet as a method of data collection because it was, with some actors, the only way to get information. This information reflects only what the actors want to show about his reality and does not give the opportunity to ask questions. It is important to realize this during the analysis of actors because much information might be missing. My research is definitely biased by the fact that I am not a Ugandan and worked together with GIZ. First of all, I did not speak Luganda, therefore I needed a translator for the interviews with the people in the slums since they did not speak English. In the beginning my translator abbreviated the answers of my respondents, but after I explained her that I wanted to know everything they told, she expanded her translations. It is still possible that I have missed interesting answers because of the language barrier, but I tried to limit this by talking to at least 36 inhabitants and comparing their answers. My research is probably influenced by the elections and the political unrest during the research period. Many of the discussions on the streets and in my interview were filled with political notes. It is hard to say if this is an influence of that moment or a common way of discussing life in Uganda. But although it might have biased my research, it has also been a positive influence because many people talked about the power relations in the country that were shown during election time. The papers were full of

15 stories about the power of Museveni who arrested his opponents when they protested with a ‘walk to work’. The political unrest also made it more difficult to do research since the slums and the centre of the city were sometimes too dangerous to access because of teargas and shootings. This caused much delay. Most of the respondents asked me to not use their names because this could influence the position they were in at the moment. None of the respondents agreed with me taping the conversations, so I relayed on my notes during my data analysis. This is shown in my thesis since there are not many quotes of respondents. I explained to all my respondents that I was a student from the Netherlands, supported by GIZ, doing research in Kampala. I decided, on advice of GIZ that I would not pay my informants. GIZ gave this advice because they argued that when one researcher will pay its respondents, it will get harder and harder to get information from respondents because they would ask for more every time they were questioned. Since GIZ was my host, I agreed with their conditions.

16 Chapter 2 Unpacking The Energy Policy Process in Uganda

The Energy Policy in Uganda exist of many documents, but since the interest of this thesis lies in the policy documents that have target the slums in the main cities, there are two major documents that are important to discuss. The Energy Policy for Uganda and The Renewable Energy Policy for Uganda. I will shortly discuss what the main goals in these policies are and which goals are or are supposed to be of influence on the slums. An extended version of the policies will be found at the website of the MEMD.1 The policies describe some of the actors that were active creating the policy or that should be active implementing the policy. I will discuss them but I will also discuss the actors that I met in the field during field research of which I think they have an influence on the policy process. Also in line with McGee, I will discuss their networks and in line with Long I will discuss their worldviews, understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests, political trajectories, ideologies, and struggles concerning energy. By doing this the spaces of the ‘energy policy process’ arena will become clearer as well as the way knowledge on this subject is gained by the different actors. The slum habitants will not be discussed in this chapter, first of all because they were the biggest research group and deserve a private chapter since they gave much new information, but second, they did not or hardly participate in the policy process and therefore do not belong in this chapter. So I will discuss the actors using Long’s actor oriented approach, but I will also address them through the theory of McGee whereby I will look into the spaces and knowledge aspects as well as the power, history, culture and political economy influences concerning the energy policy process. This history aspect will be shortly addressed at the beginning of the chapter since colonial history put is stamp on the energy use in Uganda.

A Short History of Ruling Powers, Policy Process and Energy The Republic of Uganda is known as the Pearl of Africa because of its rich and diverse environment. It is a landlocked country that also borders the big Lake Victoria and is crossed by the River Nile. The country has many different landscapes; dry and sandy in the north, rough and mountainous in the south, with running water towards and winds coming from the Lake. Uganda is a country with a many possibilities of gaining energy from renewable resources. The Ugandan Rift Valley System does have a geothermal potential of 450 MW according to the Energy Policy.

1 The Energy Policy for Uganda, written in September 2002 is available online from; http://www.energyandminerals.go.ug/pdf/EnergyPolicy.pdf. The Renewable Energy Policy for Uganda, written in November 2007 is available online from; http://www.rea.or.ug/userfiles/RENEWABLE%20ENERGY%20POLIC9-11-07.pdf

17 In the book ‘Electricity Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid’ (2009), there is a chapter, written by Christopher Gore, that gives good insights in the history of Uganda’s energy sector. Access levels in Uganda nowadays are extremely low, even when compared with other African countries. These are access levels for electricity. Gore explains that the access levels in Uganda (32% in urban areas and 1% in rural areas) can for a big part be explained by the history of Uganda and its rulers. The chapter is extensive; therefore I will only give a short overview of the historical developments of the energy process in Uganda. Some elements will be missing, not because they are not important, but because the argument of Gore is the most important. Winston Churchill was one of the first (in 1905) who wrote about the privatising hydroelectric developments in Uganda, although the East African Power and Lightening Company (EAP&L) already defined this potential. They were denied by the British to get a license to generate an distribute hydroelectricity until 1936 when their chairman Harold Odam met Philip Mitchet, the Ugandan Governor of that moment. In this period Uganda was the protectorate of the Britain’s, which lasted until 1962. But it was already in 1948 that the EAP&L could not longer enjoy its monopolistic position, because the Uganda Electricity Board (UEB) took over all of their operations. The UEB was sort of independent from the government, the national politics and local politics, and planned to build a dam that made the generation of electricity from running water possible. The Owen dam, as it was called, was realized and ‘the numbers of customers peaked and plateaud’. (Gore, 2009, pp. 370) That the UEB was sort of independent means that many of the board members had also political positions, either local or national. From independence onwards there would be no clear difference anymore between the ideas of the UEB and the national and local politics. In this period the World Bank entered the stage, denying Kenya to start their own hydroelectric resources since Uganda had enough to provide the whole of East Africa, when the plan was finished of course. But until Museveni came into power in 1986, after years of different often-cruel rulers, nothing happened with the energy plan of the World Bank. Gore argues that the idea behind building the dam was purely economic and financial; there was no social developmental goal. He also argues that the historic electricity vision of Britain still exists in today’s Uganda. There is still the ‘assumption that more electricity for economic growth will eventually trickle down to citizens’. (Gore, 2009, pp. 371) I argue with this, because the documents of the Ugandan government as well as some goals of the organisations that are involved with them, focus on electricity for economic growth, something I will show later in this chapter. In 1983 the Energy Sector Management Assistant Program (ESMAP) reported about the energy sector of Uganda. Their rapport also highlighted the biomass and renewable energy possibilities of the country. The World Bank used this as an inspiration but its philosophy was: ‘first power sector reforms, then the launce of the Energy for Rural Transformation, then a new Petroleum Bill, and then biomass’. (Gore, 2009, pp. 375)

18 Gore concludes that donor support will be still necessary to finish the World Bank plans for Uganda’s energy sector, as well as the necessity of private and public investments. The energy sector of Uganda has been and is influenced by its history. The British rulers as well as the World Bank have influenced the outline of the goals and influenced the energy discourse of Uganda.

Energy Policies2 Uganda has a Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development that is responsible for the Energy Policy for Uganda and the Renewable Energy Policy for Uganda. These policies were respectively written in 2002 and 2007 by those ministries in cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the World Bank, NORAD, SIDA, JICA, other government departments and other development partners and the private sector. Not all the actors are mentioned by name, like the private sectors. The goal of the Energy Policy for Uganda is ‘to meet the energy needs of Uganda’s population for social and economic development in an environmentally sustainable manner’. This document of 43 pages describes the need for a holistic energy policy, explores the energy sector of Uganda and sets policy goals and objective together with a strategy to reach this goals and objectives. Below gives a short summary of the sector, its problems, and the strategy of the government are given.

In the past, during the rule of President Museveni, there was no long term planning concerning energy, plans were made annually according to the budget available and a policy framework was lacking. According to the documents, the he new policy should look more into abundant energy resources like hydrological and renewable resources, should have a long term focus which is sustainable and affordable, should be linked to other sectors like health, and should be compatible with global and regional trends. One aspect that is often mentioned in the policy is the lack of institutions and legal frameworks, which is therefore one of the main targets in the policy. The policy defines some broad sector issues. One of them is the inadequate government institution that makes research and development and planning and monitoring difficult. This inadequacy is the result of not enough staff on the right places, not enough budget and no appropriate studies that create the right knowledge on energy subjects. The sector has long been neglected and there was no cooperation between the different government institutions so knowledge sharing was also neglected. The information available was inadequate and there was no opportunity to enable modern and efficient services. The goal of the policy is to change all of these problems towards positive outcomes. Interesting is that at the end of the Energy Policy there are goals set with a time span and explained is where the money should come from, but there is no implementer or responsible person/organisation mentioned. The Renewable Energy Policy is more precise on actions and goals as

2 Information comes from the Energy Policy for Uganda 2002 and the Renewable Energy Policy for Uganda 2007, as well as from conversations with GIZ members and members of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development.

19 well as implementers and responsible persons/organisations, because this is a deepening of the Energy Policy.

The energy sector of Uganda is divided into four sub-sectors; Power, Petroleum, New and Renewable Sources of Energy, and Atomic Energy. Power is the distribution, generation and transmission of electricity and the act supporting this sector is the 1999 Electricity Act, which is regulated by the ERA (Electricity Regulatory Authority). The goal in the electricity sector is to liberalise the generation and distribution, but the current assets remain public ownership. Especially hydropower has a great potential in Uganda, since the River Nile is crossing the country. During 2011 there was a dam established in the River Nice, which will be able to create enough energy for the Kampala region. But Uganda’s electrification rate is very low; in 2002 only 5% of the population had grid access. 1% of the population of Uganda provided itself with electricity by using diesel, petrol gensets, car batteries or solar PV systems. In the power sector there, according to the policy, is not enough financing for development and subsidising is too expensive to provide this service for a long time. The supply and service of electricity is low and the industry deals with high technical and non-technical loses. The system of reading electricity meters is inadequate and there is no database of customers, so no overview of who use and doesn’t use electricity. All these aspects make that electricity is very expensive and therefore not accessible for many people.

The policy divides the Petroleum sub-sector in upstream and downstream industries, where upstream industries are responsible for exploration, development and production and downstream industries are responsible for transportation, refining, distribution and marketing. Production of petroleum is not yet established in Uganda, but there is generation capacity, so goal is to attract investors to the industry. The result is that all petroleum is imported, mainly from Kenya and some from Tanzania. The government promotes the extension of the petroleum pipeline from Kenya to Uganda, and also looks into building a pipeline between Tanzania and Uganda to limit the costs of transport. The smuggling of petrol is has already been fought by bio-code marking since 2000, but prices are still high because of the liberalisation. The problems in the petroleum sector are thus focused on limited public resources for investment in the upstream industry. The promotion campaigns are, according to the policy, ineffective and they are not able to acquire the necessary data for exploration. The downstream industry contends with an institutional and legal framework that is inadequate; there is no competition and transparency and no control of quality. This also makes smuggling more attractive. The costs of petroleum are high because of high margins by oil companies and high transport costs. During the time of this research the prices raised even more because of the world wide economic crisis.

20 Uganda owns several renewable energy sources: woody and non-woody biomass, solar, wind, geothermal, and hydrological resources. Biomass is defined is the policy as firewood, charcoal and crop residue and 90% of the energy consumption of the country exist of this resource. The resource is used mostly for cooking and water heating and contributes to a lot of employment in the rural areas. The technologies used to consumer these resources are wood and charcoal stoves, which are very inefficient. Goal in this policy is to fight afforestation and to promote improved stoves. The other forms of renewable energy are not yet highly used, although solar PV systems are now and then used for water heating, crop drying, but also to charge mobile phones. Although the last one is not mentioned in the policy, driving through the rural areas gives enough evidence of this. The main obstacles in this sector are the inefficient use and production of biomass energy and the low public awareness of the potency of efficiency when using renewable energy technologies (RETs). The market is therefore underdeveloped. There is a need for data on RETs because this could promote the use and the financing of these technologies. But then monitor standards and quality control should be ensured and this is not available at the moment. Another problem, although not mentioned in the policy, is the priority that is not given to this sector, but to other sectors as Gore (2009) mentioned. More on this subject is described below in this chapter when the Renewable Energy Policy is discussed.

Atomic energy is mainly used in the agriculture and health sector. There are no plans for other uses; the policy argues that protecting public and environment from the dangers by regulation and awareness raising is of importance. Since there is no institutional and legislative framework for regulating atomic activities, the regulation of the dangers is difficult and because of lacking budget, there is no money to improve this or to create public awareness.

Besides a description of the several energy forms, the policy also describes the spaces of energy use: transport, industry and commerce, households and institutions, and agriculture.

The transport sector uses a lot of petroleum since the main transport is by old buses and mini-buses or motors. There is no good mass transport system and the bad roads and poor mechanical conditions contribute to the high consumption of petroleum. There is no awareness of the consequences of using petroleum among the end-users and so there is no action taken to manage this better and no money invested in new efficient technologies. The awareness is lacking because there is no information available and because there is no skilled manpower in the energy management. Also the industry and commerce use old inefficient technologies, which uses lots of charcoal and wood, this had a negative impact on the forest cover of Uganda. The housekeeping of most industries is poor; manpower and skilled staff is not available and awareness is lacking.

21 Most of the Uganda households and institutions make use of wood fuel and charcoal in inefficient stoves. There are some improved stoves that use LPG and Kerosene, but they are hardly used because of the costs, lack of awareness and other socio-economic barriers. This last aspect is not further elaborated on. Although fertilisers are mostly biological, the energy consumption in the agricultural sector should, according to the policy, not be neglected as it used to be. The processing of agricultural products needs a fair amount of fuel like firewood, charcoal and diesel. There is no data on the consumption of energy in this sector, but it is clear that mainly biomass and human and animal energy is used. There is hardly any use of modern technologies that are more energy efficient among the smallholders.

Many of the problems mentioned in the Energy Policy in the several sectors, and problems concerning conservation are related to lack of knowledge on technologies and lack of awareness among users. Furthermore there is no investment culture in Uganda and institutional and legal frameworks are either inefficient or not available. To reach the goal of the policy; ‘to meet the energy needs of the Ugandan population of social and economic development in an environmentally sustainable manner’; the policy describes five broad objectives and describes regulation principles for the energy sectors. There are also strategies set out for the demand and supply side. These will be shortly addressed below.

The five broad objective set by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development are; 1) To establish the availability, potential and demand of the various energy resources in the country. To meet this objective, a database has to be prepared with all energy resources set out and their consumption and availability now and in the future. 2) To increase access to modern affordable and reliable energy services as a contribution to poverty eradication. To meet this objective private capital should be attracted and competition between providers should be promoted as well as development of energy technologies and services. The focus on rural areas should be higher and subsidies, regulations, area related tariffs, purchase assistance, and guidelines on organising rural communities should make it easier to introduce new technologies. 3) To improve energy governance and administration. Roles and functions should be more clear and frameworks transparent. Implementation should be better formulated to build more national and local capacity and all stakeholders should be involved in this process. 4) To stimulate economic development. Creating more competition and attracting investments as well as ensure energy supply security and reliability can help stimulating this economic development. 5) To manage energy-related environmental impacts. This will be done by promoting alternative sources of energy and sensitise energy suppliers and users about the environmental issues.

22 There is also the plan of establishing targets for the reduction of emissions and a stronger monitoring system for the environment. The energy sector of Uganda is liberalised, but there are still legislative and regulatory gaps that cause unfair prices. Two types of regulation (economic and competition) should change this. For the Power sector the Electricity Regulatory Authority already regulates this through the Electricity Act of 1999. This authority is responsible for licences and licence fees, as well as for developing codes of conduct, performance and quality standards and tariff structures. The Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy sub-sectors will not be regulated on the short term, the government wants to wait until other countries have more experience. But an ‘emphasis will be put on awareness, quality control and standards’. Reading this as it is written down, it would mean that renewable energy would have to wait in the background until other countries have done things that seem to be effective. It will be difficult to raise awareness and create standards and quality controls when regulation has to wait.

Since this thesis focuses not only on energy but also especially on cooking energy used in the slums of Kampala, we take a deeper look into the renewable energy policy since most inhabitants of the slums argued to use wood and charcoal for cooking and lightening and made less use of other energy sources. This policy is written by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, some related government departments and GIZ, but in the introduction there is mentioned that a lot of stakeholders should be thanked, unfortunately there are no names. Uganda has a lot of renewable energy resources available (resources that are replenished by natural processes), but only the large hydro resource, namely the River Nile, is currently used. Other resources like biomass, solar, wind and geothermal resources are hardly used, but the Renewable Energy Policy is focused on these resources and on making these available for a larger proportion of the population. The need for the policy is there, because there are new renewable energy technologies noticed by the government that are commercially viable and thus should be used in Uganda. Besides this, renewable energy is in the end cheaper and more certain than fossil fuels, especially in the future, and the emissions from coal and fossil fuels cause global warming. But there are some challenges in the country. Because of the drought, Lake Victoria’s water level is low and thus less electricity is coming from these sources. Also the oil prices are high and the electrification rate in rural areas is extremely low. With new renewable energy technologies these challenges might be met. The overall objective of the Renewable Energy Policy is; ‘to diversify the energy supply sources and technologies in the country. In particular, the policy goal is to increase the use of modern renewable energy from the current 4% to 61% of the total energy consumption by the year 2017.’ (The Renewable Energy Policy for Uganda, 2007, pp. 7) These modern renewable energies are electricity from renewable sources and biomass energy and bio fuels.

23 Making electrical power more accessible for middle-income households is one of the main goals in the area of small renewable power investment. This will be reach by lowering the transaction time and costs by setting a standard for feed-in-tariffs and creating a standard power purchase agreement. At the moment this is negotiated per case, which costs time and makes the business environment more unpredictable. Solar energy technologies often have high investment costs, therefore the policy argues for a regulation that obliges urban developers to invest in solar energy technologies. Bio fuel production is not yet developed, but with the introduction of testing facilities and monitoring standards as well as with fiscal incentives the government hopes to promote this. Since there are no incentives for growing energy corps, the use of wood fuel, charcoal and biogas in households is still inefficient. Giving incentives will contribute to reafforestation and the sustainable use of biomass. The promotion of efficient stoves for low-income households will further reduce deforestation and health issues from indoor air pollution. Also the open burnings of waste and the disposal of biomass wastes will be handled with a legislation that makes it impossible to burn or dispose this waste without extracting the energy from it.

The effect of this policy should be the diversification of energy supply sources and mechanisms. This will minimize the risk of overdependence on one source and creates a country energy security. The policy makes it possible to wholly or partially substitute the use of petrol with bio fuels that are locally produced. There are several barriers that make the development and utilization of renewable energy difficult. The upfront investment costs of new technologies are often high and the legal and institutional frameworks are inadequate as well as financing mechanisms, and standards and quality assurance for RETs. At the moment resources are used inefficiently, partly because a lack of awareness of the availability, benefits and opportunities of new technologies. But there is also no sufficient data and information about this availability and technologies, which makes it logic that there is also no awareness. There has been no attention to resource planning, training, research, development and technological transfer and all of these aspects are not mentioned in policies or regulatory instruments. The policies goal is to overcome all these barriers.

In the policies energy is seen as a source with many potentials, which, ideologically, should be accessible for every person in the country. There are many struggles, especially concerning money and investment possibilities, and institutions that are missing or lacking. Also knowledge seems like a struggle, mostly because it is missing. It is not always clear why the knowledge is missing, maybe money does play a role and maybe people with the knowledge are not present in the country. Interestingly the policy focuses on goals that at the moment cannot be met because they lack in

24 money, regulation, and knowledge. These goals need development! And mostly development in a sustainable way in order to reduce emissions and reduce to amount of use of inefficient technologies.

So meeting the energy needs of the population is the primary goal of the policy. Unfortunately the policy does not refer to any research that is done to get to know the needs of the population. Besides no research, nowhere in the policy is mentioned what the needs are, only that there are goals that have to be met. It is not clear why the rural population needs electrification and cannot be helped with, for example, solar panels. There is also no clear specification between different target groups, while they might have different needs and thus a different policy. The policy mentions the existence of socio- economic barriers, but does not address the social barriers intensively. The economic barriers and institutional barriers are clear; there is no money, no legislation, no investments, no regulation, no promotion and no competition. For these problems they give workable solutions. But the question is if these solutions solve the problem. Are there reasons for these economic and institutional barriers that are not mentioned in the policy? Will implementation of the strategies be enough? To answer these questions and to understand where the drive for development comes from, I tried to interview as many actors of the policy process as possible. Some of them I was unable to reach, but I can describe them through documents and pages found on the World Wide Web, others were easily accessible for conversation. I describe the actors below and asked them, if possible, what their view on the energy policy process was and what their idea of energy was. I tried to focus on the poor urban community when asking these questions, but since my interviews were semi-structured I received much more information about the policy process in Uganda.

Energy Actors First, I will address actors of the government. So I will start with the president and the ministry actors and will end with the Non Governmental Organisations and businesses that are hardly or not related to the government but do have some influence on the policy process. The place of the actors in this ordering does not make them more or less important to the policy process. All of them have, in one- way or another, influence on the policy, willing or unwillingly. This also counts for the slum inhabitants discussed in chapter three. Information comes either from personal interviews, stories I heard, and documents and Internet pages. All are placed in the context that they are found in.

Museveni Museveni, re-elected during the Presidential elections of February 2011, has been the President of Uganda for more than 25 years and will be the President for the next four years. It is a long time for a President, although it is not uncommon in Africa. One of the reasons for this long period is that there has not been a real opponent until last elections. He probably did make himself less popular when he threw his biggest opponent, Besigye, in jail during the protest walk ‘walk to work’ in March, where

25 people were protesting against the high oil prices. He neither became more popular when he started to use teargas and bullets on the protesters. I did not talk to the man himself unfortunately, so I have to rely on the stories I heard from my respondents and stories I heard on the streets from people who I did not pick as respondents but became my respondents during conversations. I met opponents and people who loved Museveni, I read two newspapers, one independent one and one written by Museveni’s followers. The election time went together with a lot of power cuts in my neighbourhood. The stories tell that this happened not by accident but because one of Museveni’s election opponents lived in that area. The neighbours but also my landlord had a lot of discussions about this, although they were often joking. These power cuts were indeed a bit suspicious since they often happened at 7 in the evening (at that time it becomes dark in Uganda) and power often came back between 10 and 11 that evening (the time most people lay in bed). It was a middle/rich class area I lived in where most people were connected to grid electricity but also had a generator that worked on petroleum for moments of power cut. The other story that buzzed around was, maybe therefore, that Museveni had a deal with the oil company to share in the profit coming from the extra use of petrol due to the power cuts in these areas. None of these stories were verified, and they might not have even been true, but it tells something about the status of Museveni and the rich oil companies in Uganda. Both have a powerful status in the eyes of the storytellers, and their incentive is either money or votes or other political reasons, which they gain by cheating and lying according to the storytellers. The storytellers were people living in the neighbourhood, but also the boda-boda drivers agreed with these stories when I asked them. Shortly after and during the Election Day there were stories of unfair elections, missing voting boxes or voting papers that were already filled in. Honestly I have no idea if the elections were fair, although an international commission said they were, but many people had the feeling that they were not and that Museveni had cheated in order to win. Another story that came to me and described the power of Museveni, was the one about the cars used by government departments. In the period before the Election Day, I had planned to join some people of GIZ to a meeting of BEETA (this actor will be discussed later). We were supposed to go by car, but when I arrived at the office there was some unrest because there were some cars occupied by government officials because Museveni needed them for his campaign. Some of us (not me) were forced to go by boda-boda, which is illegal to do when you work at GIZ or the government, because it is a dangerous way of participating in Ugandan traffic. The GIZ people were a bit angry but told me that this happens during election time, although it sometimes keeps them from working since they are less able to move around the country to visit projects and partners. According to the stories Museveni has a powerful status in the country and is able to force people, one way or another, to vote for him. He is also able to force electricity companies to shut down power and to make deals with Shell to gain money. His interest lies, not in developing the country, but in gaining

26 money and votes to keep his status. These stories show a fear, but also an idea of not being able to change the situation because of a powerful president.

Actors at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development The following is stated on the website of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development:

‘The mandate of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development (MEMD) is "To establish, promote the development, strategically manage and safeguard the rational and sustainable exploitation and utilization of energy and mineral resources for social and economic development".’

Main Priorities

In the medium term, the key priorities of the Ministry are:

 to increase electricity generation capacity and development of the transmission network;  to increase access to modern energy services through rural electrification and renewable energy development;  to promote and monitor petroleum exploration and development in order to achieve local production; and  to promote mineral investment through the acquisition of geoscientific data and capacity building. (http://www.energyandminerals.go.ug/)

The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development (MEMD) building is placed in Kampala along one of the main streets next to the Post Office, a place everyone knows. When I travelled there, I had to take a motor with a motor rider (a boda-boda) and the first time I did that I told him I wanted to go to the Ministry of Energy building. He had no idea what or where it was. The Post Office he knew, just like all the other boda-boda’s. The building is sandy coloured and there is a security post where they check your bag unless they have seen you several times before. In this building I met an Assistant Commissioner New and Renewable Sources of Energy, a busy man with clear ideas on how the policy should be implemented. The first time I met him I was accompanied by a supervisor of GIZ, he was my mentor from GIZ during my research time in Uganda. And before we went to the assistant commissioner we discussed a little about the political situation in Uganda. The GIZ supervisor argued that all decisions made in Uganda had a political background and were often based on the amount of votes the president would gain through this decision. Especially the slums were, according to him, victims of this political decision-making. Any action to improve the conditions in the slums was done in exchange for votes, he told me, and when a slum had a low voting rate on Presidential elections they would be sure to have no improvement as long as that President was seated.

27 The assistant commissioner had a different opinion. When I asked him what the problems in the energy process were, he replied what was also written in the policies on energy. There was no institutional capacity, no money and no awareness, as well as a lack of adequate data. Money, according to him, was the biggest constrain, it created the gab between policymaking and policy implementation because the policy in itself was good. In the second conversation I had with the assistant commissioner I asked him more about the policy goal and the people behind the documents. When I asked him if there were actors who were more able to influence the policy than others, he reacted that ‘all mentioned people had an even participation in the process’. When reading the Energy Policies I came across many participants and stakeholders and contributors, but when I asked him about them he could not tell me more because this question was ‘too political’. He was able to tell me more about how they implemented the policies that had the slums as their targets. There was an Energy Efficiency Week once a year in the slums of Kampala en the goal was to decentralize this to other parts of the country. This week was organized to create more awareness upon improved stoves and clean cooking. Further more the government promotes that the private sector is involved in biomass trainings to create more technicians. The assistant commissioner proudly told me that all the goals in the Renewable Energy Policy for Uganda would be reached in 2017. When I asked him if they had already incorporated some of their findings of practical experiences into the policy process he responded that this was not possible. You can only insert new knowledge after you have reached the ending term of the policy, only then things can be revised. I was not able to meet with other people of the MEMD most were occupied due to the elections and the following demonstrations; others were seen as not important to meet. I was not able to meet people without the help of GIZ. Although the target of the MEMD is social development as well as economic development, I could not detect the social factors, since most of them seem to be focused on economic progress. This shows the still economic focus of the government.

Actors of GIZ-PREEEP The company GIZ (Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit), formerly known as GTZ, is closely related to the MEMD. I approached them when I was already in Uganda, since they were the first I came across during my online research of actors in the energy policy of Uganda. They were kindly willing to help me doing my research and gave me a place where I could work now and then. They linked me to one of their staff members. He linked me to other actors in the policy field, like the MEMD and Ugastove. GIZ gives the following statement on its website;

‘On behalf of the Federal Development Ministry we are supporting our partners by implementing measures to promote democracy, civil society and public administration, water

28 supply, food security, the preservation of biological diversity and raw materials governance. Moreover, we attach major importance to promoting regional cooperation as exemplified by the support we are delivering to the African Union and its programmes.’ (http://www.gtz.de/en/themen/16464.htm)

The governmental organization shows in this statement that its focus lies in regional promotion for African programs. For Uganda this means, according to the website, the following;

‘Financial and Technical Cooperation between Germany and Uganda goes back more than thirty years. Whilst conflicts and oppressive regimes marred the country’s development in the first decades after independence, since 1986 most parts of the country have been peaceful and the necessary frameworks for social and economic development have now been established.’

It is argued in this statement that the cooperation has good frameworks in Uganda, although it does not make clear which kind of frameworks and who are part of these frameworks, it can be argued that this also includes actors at regional base since this is their focus in their former statement. When they turn to the subject of energy in Uganda they argue that;

‘GTZ has been implementing its Energy Advisory Project since 1999, but energy as a focal area of German cooperation with Uganda is relatively new. Since August 2007, Energy is a focal area and with a new title namely: Promotion of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Programme (PREEEP). The coordinating role amongst the German organisations in the focal area has been given to GTZ, which has the longest experience in the sector.’

GIZ noticed that the energy supply goal that Uganda has set for itself is not accomplished yet although there have been a lot of investments. They argue that this is partly the consequence of inefficient use of the available energy by the consumers. I spoke to several employees of GIZ that worked for the program PREEEP about the policy process and the policy goals that were set by the government. I also asked them about solutions on regional base. GIZ is not very active in the urban areas of Kampala, their focus is on the rural areas where the trees were cut down and where the charcoal was produced. This is in line with the focus of the government, who also wants to focus more on the rural areas. They have many projects in rural areas to promote efficient stoves, small ones and big ones for institutions like schools. Interesting was the mixture of nationalities within GIZ. It was a mixture of Germans and Ugandans with mixed ranking. All of the people I spoke with had the goal to participate in creating a better environment for Uganda by introducing new technologies. It was difficult to get a good view of their relationship with the government. They are dependent of them, since a part of the money comes from the government.

29 Most of my discussions were with my supervisor who was very open about the relation with the government and how the government acted in Uganda. He himself was a Ugandan who worked already for a couple of years for GIZ and had been to Germany for classes. We discussed the enforcement of law, since I was interested in the implementation of the energy policy. He argued that the policy in itself was fine, but that does not mean that the implementation is guaranteed. ‘It depends on how politically valuable the policy is’. He meant that priorities of the government can be with other policies, which means that money will not go to the implementation of less important policies. This is not the only problem; another problem is that of accountability. Many people on the responsible places are not motivated to do their jobs properly because there is no consequence if they do not. Since they are not hold accountable for mistakes or failures and still see their salary every month, there is no need to push the implementation of certain policies. The reason that the energy policy is focused on electricity (he acknowledged this) is because of how power works in Uganda. Not the power in the sense of the product, but power in the sense of power of people. People with power in Uganda are the people that are able to let their voice been heard. Mostly these are the rich people, because they have jobs on the right spots and money to influence people on the rights spots. My supervisor called this the ‘subjectivity of life’; this is a certain state of mind where people think in patterns of influence. Decisions are subject to the patterns of influence, which means that all decisions made are politically influenced. If someone wants something done, he will not look at how to convince people of what he wants. He will look at whom he needs to bribe to get his thing done. Since rich people use electricity, they force (while using the patterns of influence) to make this more important than for example clean cooking for the poor. ‘It is different in your country’ (Kampala, 16- 2-2011) he argues, because in my country people do what is written in the policies.

CIM CIM is a joint cooperation of GIZ and the German Federal Employment Agency. I did not contact the Centre for International Migration and Development, but I met their people in different settings. One of them worked for Ugastove, the other worked for CREEC and I met some at GIZ. Both organizations will be described later in this chapter. The description of CIM on their website is the following;

‘The Centrum für internationale Migration und Entwicklung (CIM) is the human resources placement organisation for German Development Cooperation.

We place managers and technical experts in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern and South Eastern Europe, and we support them with services and with subsidies to top up their local salaries.

Our partners are competent, independent employers within our partner countries’ civil

30 services, private sectors and civil societies. On their behalf, we recruit experts from European Union countries on the German labour market, and also partner-country experts who have been educated in Germany and would like to return to their home countries.

Our mission is to support our partners’ contributions to their countries’ development and the attainment of the goals set jointly by each partner country and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). We accomplish this by supplying the demand of these countries for the kind of highly-qualified professionals they could not attract under customary national employment conditions.’

(http://www.cimonline.de/en/profile/43.asp)

The MEMD worked together with the people send by CIM, who where experts in energy policy or energy techniques that could be used in Uganda. Most of them had technical knowledge as well as knowledge that could help for example Ugastove with the paperwork connected to international legislation. The get paid by the Ugandan organization they worked for with a local salary which is complemented by the German Federal Ministry. As showed in the conversation I had with the CIM employee at CREEC, they are send to bring knowledge on a certain expertise. This would not be possible without the complemented salary, because these people would probably not work for the local salary.

I have now discussed the actors that were actively and openly part of the creation of the policy. But I spoke to a lot more actors that are mentioned in the policy, not by name, but as actors that should do something although they were not asked to do it. I also spoke to actors that indirectly influenced the policy, some of them might not even know, or probably didn’t know. Most of them are organisations or small private companies that are active in the slum energy field or just in the slum field. Another actor is the electricity supply company. I came across them either through GIZ or because one named the other. Sometimes I met them wile wandering through the slums. Some I did not met for different reasons. These are stove makers, stove developers, carbon credit bureaus, people working for the university and sometimes an NGO, although these were rare. These actors cannot be divided in more or less influential; I will address them in the order that I found them in Uganda. Some of them I met several times, others just once.

31 BEETA The Biomass Energy Efficiency Technology Association is a new association that started officially at 17 March 2011, when I was at a GIZ-PREEEP workshop to meet stove producers and other people working in the stove field. The stoves they were talking about would lower the amount of wood or charcoal used and would lower the emission of harmful gasses. These stoves were created for use in the slums, mostly, and sometimes stove or schools or other big organisations that use wood or charcoal. The meeting lasted two days and many knew each other. Many wanted to talk to me, for different reasons and they offered me a place on the board, which I kindly refused. A lot of the stove makers that attended the meeting had their own business, often a one of two-man business in stoves. They had a place to work, had some knowledge upon stove making and all were lacking money and knowledge to build improved stoves. The goal of the association was to create a platform for stove builders where they could exchange knowledge. Since this was only the first official meeting most of the discussions were focused on what the participants needed and what they were missing, but also on how they saw this association helping them. The biggest problems were money and knowledge. Most of the stove builders were very interested in the improved stove but argued that they needed more knowledge. They agreed with the new board that this association could help creating common knowledge on stoves. The money problem was more difficult, but all agreed that they needed only a start up capital and could proceed with their business after the first financial injection. The money had to come from the government. The government official that came by to speak during the last day told them they had to create money themselves, since it was not the job of the government to give this money. He argued that the Uganda Carbon Bureau could help them creating carbon credits and in this way creating money to start their businesses. Most of the participants at the meeting agreed that they had to find money themselves; others argued that the government was responsible for creating a climate where setting up businesses like this was possible. Interesting was, for me, that there were many women attending the meeting who also took lead in the discussions, while the men were discussing more in the background. Even when they had to work in groups, the women took the lead and came with ideas on how to structure the organisation and discussed which topics and problems had priority.

Ugastove One of the participating stove builders at the BEETA meeting was Ugastove. Ugastove is (or was) a private company started by Mohammed Kawere, which is focused on biomass energy from wood and charcoal and creates technical devices for household and institutional use. The goal was, as Mohammed told me, ‘to improve the quality of life by making products accessible and affordable’. Unfortunately Mohammed passed away four weeks before I left Uganda, so I was not able to speak to

32 him again, but our fist conversation was interesting and inspiring. At the moment that I left, the future of the company was unsure since Mohammed was the main drive behind the company. There are several people working there, including someone from CIM. The company had a close relation with GIZ-PREEEP, GIZ helped Ugastove through the building of market capacity and thinking through a marketing model for them. GIZ used the stove to promote its programs in rural but also in urban areas and the MEMD used the stove as an example during the Energy Efficiency Week. Ugastove was a known company, although not for the slum inhabitants but for the other companies and organisations I describe in this chapter, since their market-share in Kampala and central Uganda was quite large comparing to the others active in the same business. Mohammed really wanted to contribute to the policies since he thought that stove builders were key players in the field of renewable energy for the slums, but he didn’t know that he contributed. Of course he did because his stove was used by GIZ and MEMD as an example for others and for campaigns. It was the fist stove I saw when I was at the MEMD building and in the GIZ offices. Ugastove has connections with many partners. There is Aprovecho, who helped with the design of the stove and helped making it customized to the wishes of their buyers. GIZ also contributes in the design but also in the promotion of sustainable development. Ugastove is also getting carbon credits, but Mohammed told me that this is a long and expensive path to take which they were taking together with Climate Care and CEIHD. They need data of their stoves: who bought them, are they used at the moment, what happens with them when they break, for how long do people use them, and do they use them all the time. They have a system where they call the user now and then to check if they still use the stove and if they are happy. The following statement on their website explains their overall goal;

‘We partner with a number of organizations to take advantage of the prevailing conducive economic environment to create employment for women and youth at all levels, improve their livelihood and provide Ugandans with affordable but durable energy saving cooking appliances.’ (http://www.ugastove.com/)

This statement focuses on economic development, but also on social development since the livelihoods of the women and youth are taken into account. They take the opportunity to use the economic climate created by their partners to contribute to the livelihoods by introducing a technology that makes it cheaper and cleaner to cook. Mohammed argued ‘they target on peri-urban and rural households that are poor or medium poor’ (Mohammed, 20-3-2011, Kampala) not only as their selling area but they also train these people in making the stoves themselves and to help them adjust the stoves to the needs in the region they live. According to Mohammed every area needs a specific stove, because the living conditions as well as the financial and environmental conditions are different. Further more, he argues that a more competitive situation is needed which will create better prices for the customers.

33 Mohammed told that almost everyone in the slums know that the stoves perform better, but they do not know where to buy them or they are still too expensive. He has a marketing staff that goes door to door to promote and sell stoves. The women do a lot better than the man, but Mohammed told that he needs the name of the minister on the promotion poster because this would convince people more to buy it. Ugastove, and especially Mohammed is the first in Uganda who created carbon credits and a system of checking the status of their sold stoves. He wants more and was talking to parties about a national plan for cook stoves. It was very inspiring to talk to him, because he was enthusiastic about the potential of the country.

PETSD Head of Promoters of Efficient Technology and Sustainable Development (PETSD), also head of BEETA, is Proscovia Sebunya and I met her during the BEETA meeting organized by GIZ-PREEEP. Their mission is to help the vulnerable people in Uganda to get a better life through sustainable development of natural resources. Vulnerable people are poor people, women and children who do not have power to help themselves. The organisations PETSD, has several ways to finance themselves. They were supported by Geneva Global but due to the worldwide economic crisis this stopped and they now earn money with consultancy jobs and buying stove material on credit. The government promised to look into Carbon Credits during the BEETA meeting, something Proscovia was also discussing with the Uganda Carbon Bureau. She hopes that one of the two can help her with the Carbon Credits since she could gain a lot of money through this. But so far she wasn’t so lucky and her hopes did not lay with the government. I asked her about the role of the government in promoting energy efficiency and implementing the policy. She hadn’t read the policy, but after I gave a short summary of it, she argued that the government should find a way to finance the start-up costs for programmes and companies like hers, because those costs were the main problem for many sustainable technology producers. Besides this, the government could play a big role in promoting the stoves throughout the country and to provide storage for the stoves at different places in the country. The stove business is now confronted with cheap stoves from other countries, Proscovia argues that it is a government task to ban or tax stoves from non Ugandan companies to make it possible for the Uganda stove business to grow. She also argues that the funding problems the government argues to have are mainly a problem of priorities, because a lot of money goes to the election these days, this money could be invested in different ways.

34 Uganda Carbon Bureau The Uganda Carbon Bureau was different from any other organisation or company I had met and would met during my research. It was situated far outside the centre of Kampala in a rich neighbourhood with clean streets and large houses with green grass and high walls. All the other actors I had met were housed in old buildings in the centre and were not that nice and clean. There, in a nice white house I met with Georg Zenk, an Energy Specialist for the Uganda Carbon Bureau, which is a consultancy bureau that has focused on CDM. If I hadn’t done an internship at a company that was specialized in CDM I probably could not have followed the conversation at all because the carbon credit system is difficult to understand. Shortly explained a carbon credit is a credit or a sum of money for an amount of carbon that you prevented from getting into the air. Stoves, like the one of Ugastove, use a technology that creates stoves that lower the emission rate of carbon compared to the stoves that are normally used. The difference in emission can be translated into credits; these credits can be exchanged for money at the Clean Development Mechanism responsible, the UNFCCC. (http://unfccc.int/2860.php) The Uganda Carbon Bureau is a bureau that helps people who have technologies that lower emissions to get the carbon credits. This is necessary because it is a long and expensive and difficult process, as Mohammed of Ugastove also explained. This mechanism is mainly used for larger technologies because those technologies make it easier to prove the lower emission rate.

‘The Uganda Carbon Bureau was registered in April 2006, and is the only full-service carbon finance company in East Africa. The Bureau provides support to project developers, carbon credit buyers, development agencies, financiers and the public with all aspects of project funding and carbon asset development in the voluntary and compliance carbon markets.’ (http://www.ugandacarbon.org/)

The company has no connection with the government, neither does it wants to. They argued that people at government places are not always suitable. Many of them have the jobs because they can earn a lot of money, not because they like the job. George argues that it is difficult to work with these people, because of their inactive attitudes. He argues that everything that does happen in the country is because of the businessman that takes action. According to him, the government does not have a business mind and is therefore not able to generate money or to attract investors. The carbon credit market makes it possible to give away efficient stoves for free, so the potential is there. The Uganda Carbon Bureau does not give them away for free, since they are business minded and want to make a profit. But it shows, according to George, the potential, something the government could participate in. They are starting up a new business in cookstoves, something they did not yet started when I was in Uganda, but I found it on their website. It was not clear exactly what it was, but GIZ was involved as well.

35 Centre for Research in Energy and Energy Conservation (CREEC) The centre is situated at the Faculty of Technology of the Makerere University. There work several PhD and Master students as well as some people from CIM (Centre for International Migration and Development). CIM is a joint cooperation of GIZ and the German Federal Employment Agency.

‘The Centre for Research in Energy and Energy Conservation (CREEC) is a not-for-profit organization for research, training and consultancy, located at and working closely together with the College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology (CEDAT, the former Faculty of Technology) within Makerere University. The centre is registered as a company limited by guarantee and not having a share capital.’ (http://www.creec.or.ug/)

The centre does not only focus on bioenergy, but also on solar PV, pico-hydro and energy management, but since I was interested in techniques of cooking energy, I discussed only the bioenergy aspect. One of the CIM employees, Karsten Bechtel, who was a CIM expert for CREEC was willing to meet with me and explain everything about what he was doing, how and why. He was, among other things, responsible for the research on energy efficient stoves and had a working space with a space for stoves and stove testing at the university complex. His main goal is to find out ‘how techniques can be useful in practice’. His interests in stoves started when he heard Ugastove talking on a PCIA meeting in 2009. He realized that this could change a lot for human and for nature. His main focus group is women because they are the ones that cook, although his research does not focus on cooking alone, he also looks at kitchen management, storage of fuels and food and the use of different fuels. He argues that due to the worldwide crisis the prices of food and fuel are now even higher than before. According to Karsten, the general idea in Uganda is that clay stoves are efficient, but this is not entirely true since it depends on the design of the stove. Another common observation of Karsten was that everyone uses charcoal because it is cheap and light, the fact that it is bad for their health does not interest them. I got a tour around his space, and he showed me together with one of the PhD students, how the stoves worked and what could be improved. There were different kinds of stoves. Some were simple designs, other were more advanced. De newest stoves was called the gasifier, this stoves led the air circle in the stove that causes complete combustion. They also explained that they adjusted the stoves to practices because cooking skills were different in the different regions, but also between larger and smaller families. We got to the subject of policy and his relation with the government. He told me he has a very good relation with the government, but also with academia and with the private sector. The government has asked him to help revising the energy policy because of his experience and expertise and the university supplies him with good students. There is even a new master that looks into renewable energy technologies. I confront him with arguments of others I spoke and tell him that a lot of people are not

36 happy with how the government act. Karsten argues that there is a general idea of ‘the King looks after everyone’, which causes that people expect that the government takes care of everything in the country. He told me the following; ‘if a neighbour in Europe would have a bigger car than we have, we would work harder or get a loan to buy an even bigger car than our neighbour. In Africa, people would ruin the car of the neighbour to solve their jealousy and then try to get the same or a better car than their neighbour’. According to Karsten this attitude has to change, because the government should make policy but should not implement it, this is a job for the people in the country. Then he gives me the number of Marco, an Italian guy who sells blue stoves (clay stoves with a blue metal coverage) and tells me that if I or anyone else wants to buy a stove, we have to buy these, they are the best performing at the moment. Unfortunately they are only sold in the north of Uganda. Luckily Marco lives in Kampala and I meet him three days later.

Marco of the blue stoves Marco is Italian, lives in Kampala with his dog and has set up a stove company that sells cheap stoves of high quality. He has started a company in the north of Uganda where he is selling more and more stoves. His stoves cost about 15.000 – 30.000 Ugandan Shilling, which is affordable for a lot of people in the north. He wants to sell more stoves in Kampala Region, but this is difficult because the stoves are heavy and transporting them from the north is expensive. I asked him about the emission rates of this stoves and he told me that although the emission of carbon might be lower, this does not count for the black particles and those might even be worse for the health of people. He tells me that the carbon emission rate is indeed lower with the new stove designs and thus benefitting the environment, but the designs need to be better in order to be really helpful for the people’s health. None of the other informants ever mentioned this before, and Marco argues that this is because it makes the stoves look less effective. Marco was one of the last informants I met, and I told him about the women saving groups (which I will discuss in the following chapter), and about their struggles with money. He told me to give his contacts to those women; he was willing to sell them stoves on credit or a lower price if this would help them. Although the health part is not yet fully tackled by the stoves, they do save charcoal and thus forest and money. This last thing is in his eyes important for the poor people to help them in their struggles.

37 Slum Dwellers International And ACTogether I came in contact with the Slum Dwellers International through Sarah, director of ACTogether. I met her via one of the GIZ members, who introduced me to her because she was active in the slum areas and had set up some saving groups. As the quote below shows, is the Slum Dwellers International very wide spread through the world but has a local focus.

‘Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is a network of community-based organizations of the urban poor in 33 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It was launched in 1996 when “federations” of the urban poor in countries such as India and South Africa agreed that a global platform could help their local initiatives develop alternatives to evictions while also impacting on the global agenda for urban development.’ (http://www.sdinet.org/about-what- we-do/)

The local initiatives in Uganda are shown by the activities of ACTogether.

‘Savings collectives in Uganda were first established in late 2002 when the Indian, South African and Kenyan Federations began to work with the Uganda Government to design and implement citywide slum upgrading programmes. Since that time, the National Slum Dwellers Federation has grown to over 30,000 members in the cities of Kampala, Arua, Jinja, Kabale, Mbale, and Mbarara, and has successfully negotiated with government to secure land for housing development and resettlement. Actogether Uganda was founded in September 2006 to provide continuous support and technical assistance to the Federation.’ (http://www.sdinet.org/country/uganda/)

ACTogether has several initiatives in Kampala. The biggest initiative is taken in the informal settlement Kisenyi, where I did some of my interviews with local residents. There has been set up, together with Hassan who represents the Slum Dwellers International and who lives in Kisenyi, a small office from where business is done. They have contacts with the government to build better houses en cleaner toilets. Hassan and Zinab, one of the women that are active in the organization, have shown me the area and introduced me to several residents. Besides building cleaner houses and toilets, they also have a saving group where people save either for building up their own house, save money for school fees, or other large investments. Zinab is saving for her house, because she used to live in a house of wood but now wants to have better housing to let her grandchildren live in better conditions. She explains that, although they get a lot of help, there are a lot of problems with building houses. The area is messy because many people defecate and dump waste on the streets. Besides this, much of the ground is owned by landlords and not by the government. These landlords can kick people out of their houses whenever they like to and the government is not able to do something about that. I asked them about the energy use in the area. Everyone cooks on charcoal or wood, and there are a few people that use electricity for fridges or lightening. I met one woman with a fridge, she has a water tap close to her

38 house, which she owns, she sells the clean water for a cheap price to her neighbors. She uses the fridge to keep the water cool, because in warmer water the bacteria grow faster. Other stories from this area are included in the next chapter. The people here, according to Hassan and Zinab, are very active in improving their own live. Many are active as savers or try to find ways to clean the area in a way that is financially benefitting them. They are interested in clean cooking, but since they just start up and are first focusing on better housing they have not done any research on this. Zinab tells me during the day that she would like to know more about efficient stoves. She thinks that this could be successfully introduced in the area, but electricity would not or is not a success. Electricity, she says, is too expensive and the devices you need too. If the government wants people to use electricity, it should at least be affordable. But this is also not the first need of people. School fees, food, and housing are much more important. We wondered around the area and many people came to us and asked Zinab what I was doing here. She explained that I was interested in the way people cook in this area and how they think of using charcoal. Most people replayed with stories about how bad the smoke was for their eyes and lungs and for their children. But cooking outside did not make this better since everyone lived so close together, the smoke still bothered everyone. Unfortunately they argued that they did not have other options because these were too expensive. They needed a loan to purchase a good stove, and none of the stove builders/sellers would do that, they needed the money right away for their families. Sarah of ACTogether told me that she did had some conversations with CREEC about making bricks from waste that could be used instead of charcoal, but that this was something for the future. The organizations ACTogehter and the Slum Dwellers International are young in Uganda, but have set up several saving groups and are very active in Kisenyi. Their relation with the government was described as good, although they would like to get more from the government. They are now focusing on income generating, saving, and better housing, because they argue that these are the things that need the improvement the most.

Electricity providers (http://www.mbendi.com/indy/powr/af/ug/p0005.htm#5 ) I have not, personally, been in contact with electricity providers. First of all there was not enough time to create an opportunity to meet them and secondly they were not my first priority to meet because the responsible authority, the Uganda Electricity Board, was privatised in 1999, although it was only effective in 2000. It was responsible for the supply of electricity, but is now divided in three companies;  Uganda Electricity Generation Company LTD (UEGCL) (http://uegcl.com/)  Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Limited (UEDCL) (http://www.uedcl.co.ug/)  Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd. (UETCL) (http://www.uetcl.com/) There is also an authority that is responsible for the regulations concerning electricity.  Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERA) (http://www.era.or.ug/)

39 Those three units are now responsible for the grid connection of Uganda, with the help of some other investors and distribution companies. The UEGCL is responsible for the generation and generates grid power at stations named Naluubale and Kiira. Naluubale was formerly the Owen Falls, a big project supported by Britain and the World Bank. On the website of the EUGCL is explained that the stations shows cracks in the tumeric wand, which they are constantly monitored. They are also involved in the Bujagali Hydropower Station, also sponsored by the World Bank. The power from this project will be sold to the UETCL (Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd.) (http://www.uetcl.com/). Besides generation of power, the UEGCL is also involved in three planting because during the construction of the Owen falls, many threes where cut. The website does not contain much more information and it is not clear if they also use other ways of generating power.

‘Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Limited (UEDCL) is a limited liability company incorporated in Uganda under the Companies Act and started operations on 1st April 2001. The Government implemented a Power Sector Reform and Privatization Policy, which resulted in the separation of Uganda Electricity Board (UEB) into Generation, Transmission and Distribution successor companies.

The UEDCL, one of the successors of the Uganda electricity board is the owner of the electricity distribution network up to 33KV. The network was handed over to Umeme limited on the 1st march 2005, under a concession arrangement. Umeme Ltd is wholly owned by CDC Globeleq of UK.’ (http://www.uedcl.co.ug/)

The UEDCL is responsible for the distribution of power in Uganda

‘It is over five years since Uganda Electricity Distribution Company’s main mandate changed from a predominantly national electricity distributor to that of an asset manager guided by the Lease and Assignment Agreement (LAA) to ensure that the distribution concession is well administered.’

(http://www.uedcl.co.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=49)

The UETCL is responsible for a ten-year grid development plan. Which means they are responsible for getting the electricity to the user through lines. They are responsible for the maintenance of the transmission lines in Uganda. Their website mentions several completed projects, no projects in progress, and several future projects. The director states at the website that they do their work and manage to reach their goals. Another page on the websites shows some problems of maintenance. Vandals who steel parts of the electricity network, and who steel transformer oil that is used for cooling destroy much of their work.

40 The ERA is responsible for the licenses for the generation, distribution, and transmission in Uganda and should make sure that demand and supply are in balance. They fall under the MEMD.

Analyses This chapter has discussed the many actors in the field of the energy policy of Uganda, except for the slum inhabitants. All of these actors showed their reality through words or texts. Some were more elaborate and accessible than others. It is very plausible that there are more actors in the fields, which I did not cross, but I have met the ones that were visible and accessible, one way or another, and this will be enough to give an overview of the policy field. Long and McGee have shown that these realities influence each other, and that they influence and are influenced by knowledge, power, history, culture, political economy, and space. All of those factors were somehow mentioned during the conversations, in the papers, or at websites. The policy process, as McGee explained exists of formulation, implementation, dynamics and patterns. Those will become clear below while discussing the factors that influence and are influenced by the actors’ realities.

The actors in the energy policy field described above have very different roles in the field, but all have influence on implementation, formulation, dynamics or patterns. Government officials are mostly responsible for the formulation of the policy, although they get help from the World Bank and GIZ. GIZ is probably one of the most visible active implementers of the policy, together with the electricity providers and the World Bank, although the last one only makes implementation possible by finance. But the stove producers, as well as organisations like ACTogeter and BEETA are implementing the policy as well and give it the patterns and dynamics. They implement the parts of the policy that do not have priority for the government. They create new stoves and create saving groups that potentially could make it possible for slum inhabitants to buy stoves. Together with GIZ, these organisations, groups and producers slowly create awareness among the poorest energy users about their possibilities. Since the government does not give priority to these activities, it goes slowly, but it works because it uses the patterns and opportunities that are available or that can be created without support.

Almost every actor acknowledged that much could be improved considering the knowledge on the topic energy in Uganda. The government does not have enough data about energy use and argues that the consumer lacks awareness of what the effects of energy use on the environment are. McGee made a difference in industrial and constructed knowledge. The first is produced for certain knowledge users. Although it is not expressively clear, the World Bank and colonial rulers have created some knowledge for the government about energy networks and energy policy. Electricity will create modernity and get you out of the poverty. That is what the colonial rulers and the World Bank

41 told the Ugandan government. The support from the World Bank was for hydropower projects, therefore this got priority for the Ugandan government. There is also another knowledge ‘movement’ from Germany, which focus on rural networks and argues that this is the best way to address the energy problem of Uganda. However, their main goal is also electricity, although they acknowledge that other steps need to be taking first before people are ready for electricity. They support the stoves, but do not have the money the World Bank has. As stated in the policy, the government wants to wait with active stove introduction and other renewable techniques to see what other countries will do and what is effective. The knowledge on renewable techniques is in Uganda, but it is not wide spread. Many of the stove producers and slum organisations I spoke with, want to get the knowledge to produce cleaner stoves and bricks from waste, but they do not know where to get this information. The information is with GIZ, MEMD, CIM and the University. There are some connections between the ones that have the information and the ones that want and need the information, but also this process is going slowly. Knowledge on the consequences of energy use is, according to most of the informants, missing with the end users. Prove for this statement will be found with the end users who are discussed in the next chapter.

History has been of great influence on the energy policy process and the political economy of Uganda because it has made economic progress trough electricity as a main goal of the policy. The colonial period, together with the involvement of the World Bank later, have created the idea of economic progress as the solution to get out of poverty. This economic progress shows itself in the energy policy as electricity for everyone. This idea has influenced the policy and the implementation since implementations of goals that benefit the introduction of electricity have priority. It has created the idea among most actors that electricity is modernity. But the presence of the German organisations GIZ and CIM created a new trend of the importance of renewable energy with new technologies. It is still a small movement but it is finding its way in government and other more local organisations. Culture is partly history and the stories that I heard about the way people act in Uganda are connected with a history of kings, violent rulers, and long-term presidents. There is often an inactive attitude among government workers, but also among other members of the society. Some of my informants relate this to the past when the kings ruled. The king is supposed to take care of his people. There is no king anymore, but there is a government who should take care of the people. People thus wait until the government acts because it is their role. It might be that the lack of accountability that is mention by one of the respondents and agreed upon by others, is related to the fact that the government has the accountability.

‘Power is ‘a network of social boundaries that constrain and enable action for all actors’. (McGee, 2004, pp. 24, cited in Gaventa & Cornwall, 2001, pp. 72) This definition corresponds with the ideas of

42 my supervisor at GIZ. He argued that the power network in Uganda is constraining the implementation of policies in general and energy policy in particular. Museveni is a ruler with a lot of power, and although there is room for counter movements, those movements are held back by tear gas and gunshots by the troops of Museveni. But not only the president has much power, the World Bank apparently too since they have the power to influence the policy of Uganda. The power patterns in Uganda are influencing the formulation and implementation of the policy as well as the access to knowledge. Although GIZ has the knowledge to introduce renewable energy technologies in the country, the process is slowed down in several ways that are connected to the power relations. This became especially clear during the election times. The money and resources for the implementation of the Renewable Energy Policy of Uganda, mostly implemented by GIZ, got on a hold during the elections. No one could tell me exactly where the money went, but some of the resources got a clear destination. The government for election purposes took the cars of GIZ, which they need to get to their project and partners. This made their work for several weeks very difficult and without the money they could not do much the moment I was there.

What is clear from this analysis is that due to the influence of the World Bank and the colonial powers, the focus of the energy policy of Uganda is on electricity. The focus of many of the organisations, co-operations, and businesses lies much more with other renewable techniques. Although knowledge on these techniques is available in the country, the spaces where this knowledge is, is not accessible for everyone. From colonial times onwards the energy policy was addressed with a top down approach where small initiative had no place. It is the responsibility of the government to bring energy to the people. This approach has not been totally successful but is not changing. Other influences are trying to access the spaces where the government is acting and some with success. Although it goes slowly, maybe too slowly, more and more actors get access to the knowledge they need in order to act the way they want. The rules might change, but it is hard to change the habit and the attitude of government and others. When Appadurai discussed that the value of a thing depends on its social life, he could have used the example of Uganda. Energy is for all actors something different; the World Bank sees electricity as the main energy source that will contribute to development, the government has the same objective, GIZ sees energy as something that should be renewable and should fit local habits, the small organisations see energy often as business.

43 Chapter 3 The Social Life of Cooking Energy in the Slums of Kampala This chapter addresses the actors that I met when I visited several slums of Kampala. The slums are not hidden and easily to access, although I took a translator with me because I don’t speak Luganda and many slums inhabitants do not speak English. One of the slums, in the area called Kisenyi, I visited was close to the centre of Kampala, behind the main roads. There are no exact data on how many people live in the slums, how many houses there are and what they do or earn on a day, in a week, or in a year. During my visits in the slums I met mainly women. I did meet some man, but most of them were head of an organisation or school. There was only one man that runs a household, because he lost his wife and female children and his mother was sick. I also talked to people who where selling charcoal, stoves or food along the roads of the slums and I visit one two schools and one saving group. This chapter gives an overview of the stories of these people telling about their worldviews, understandings, interests, values, livelihood strategies, cultural interests, political trajectories, ideologies, and struggles concerning energy, but also concerning many other things that they found important to mention and of things they thought would help me during my research. I had no structured way of finding these people; I entered the field with my translator and just asked women who were sitting in front of their houses if they wanted to talk to me about my research. Often they told me where to go next or who would be interesting to talk to because they had something or knew about something that had something to do with my research.

Actors of the Kampala Slums The city of Kampala exists of five divisions, with their neighbourhoods:  Kampala Central, (Bukoto, Kamwookya, Kololo, Mulago, Nakasere, Old Kampala, Wandegeya, Makarere, Mulago, Kisenyi  Kawempe (Bwaise, Kawempe, Jinja-Kawempe, Kanyanya, Kazo, Mpereerwe, Kisaasi, Kikaya and Kyebando, Kaleerwe),  Lubaga (Mutundwe, Nateete, Lungujja, Busega, Lubaga, Ndeeba, Mengo, Namungoona, Lubya, Lugala, Bukesa, Naakulabye, Kasubi, Namirembe and Kawaala, Nalukolungo),  Makindye (Kabalagala, Katwe, Kibuye, Kabowa, Namuwongo, Nsambya, Lukuli, Luwafu, Nsambya, Kansanga, Muyenga, Ggaba and Munyonyo, Najjanankumbi), and  Nakawa (Nakawa, Mbuya, Bugoloobi, Luzira, Port Bell, Butabika, Mutungo, Ntinda, Kigoowa, Kyambogo, Kiwaatule, Bbuye and Kulambiro, Naguru). The capital of Uganda, Kampala, exists of many slum areas in the centre and some slum areas at the borders of the city. The list of neighbourhoods is not complete, probably. I have visited the following; Kisenyi, Bwaise, Lubaga, Nalukolungo, Mutundwe and Nakawa. And I spoke, officially with 36 women, but I also spoke with neighbours and bystanders. But it was difficult to actually find out what

44 the name was of the place and where one area stopped and the next began. People just knew that a new area began, while there was no visual sign of it. The slums/neighbourhoods in their turn were divided in smaller areas, for example Bwaise 1, 2, and 3. Sometimes even the inhabitants were confused. This happened in Kisenyi when one neighbour said he lived in 1 and the other said he lived in 2. No one exactly knows how many people live in these areas but in Kisenyi the Slum Dwellers Federation did a good job trying to get the number by doing household surveys. According to them the number of people in Kisenyi 1 was 1823 males and 1905 females, but it was not clear if this was a number that include children. Many of the slum inhabitants originally came from the rural areas and where looking for jobs in the city and hoped for a better future for their children. Many of them live all of their life in the slum areas. Most of the people I spoke with had family in the rural areas and where hoping to send money to them, but had hardly money enough to support themselves. In these areas people live packed together in houses close to each other, which stand on waste, next to full latrines and close to dirty small rivers that are used as a toilet or a place to dump waste. Many streets are filled with smoke from the burning of charcoal or firewood in and outside houses and the burning of waste piles. Slum in Kampala are build, not on hills, but on the bottomlands where all the wastewater and garbage ends up. Houses are built from wooden walls or old bricks covered with sheets of corrugated material and streets are made of sand pounded flat. There are no turmeric streets, only sandy streets and when it rains these turns into little rivers, or, when you are not so lucky and live in Bwaise, big rivers that quickly fill the houses with a meter of rainwater. You meet people everywhere. Children are hanging and playing in front of the houses, women sitting next to their cooking fire, stirring the food in the pan now and then. They are chatting and laughing with each other and their children, calling their neighbours and cleaning their houses. When the rain starts the children are gathered to go inside and laundry is taken in. The rain is noting like the Dutch rain, it is a rain burst that often takes 20 minutes. Life then stops in the slums, since everything is done outside. I experienced walking through the slums and meeting the people as a pleasant venture since most people welcomed me enthusiastically and I saw a lot of smiling faces, more than I saw in the business area of Kampala.

Many of the households in the Kampala slums exist of many children (often four or more), a mother and sometimes a father or a male figure that counts as the head of the household. During the days I met mostly women and children since the man are out during the day. Women were often chatting together, I could not understand them but when I asked what they were talking about it was about what happened with whom in the area or politics. This last subject might have had a lot to do with the riots before, during and after the Presidential elections. Many of those riots were close to the slum areas and sometimes these riots ended in the slums were the army tear-gassed people. Often people in the areas where I was seemed to like each other and got along well. One day I was in the area next to Mityana

45 Road where I tried to make conversation with several women sitting in front of their houses. Many of them refused to talk or wanted money or something else in return for my time. Although it sounds fair to ask, GIZ asked me not to give anything because this would make the situation more complicated for next researchers. People would start to ask more and more as soon as they started with giving. The refusal from women only happened to me in that area, in other areas there were often too many women that wanted to talk to me. The women in this area that did talk to me explained that the government had done so many questionnaire without result that people did not trust the researchers. One woman, who was the wife of a man with two wives and 21 children, told me that she was scared of her neighbours. I found this out when I asked her why she was cooking outside. She said ‘neighbours might kill me and put something in my food, so I have no choice but cooking inside’.

If the man is around in the family he often works during the day and makes long hours from early in the morning until late in the night. Most have a job as a boda-boda driver, which is a dangerous job since the traffic in Kampala is very busy, and as a motorcycle taxi driver you are very vulnerable for accidents. Stories tell that each day five boda-boda drivers find their dead in the traffic. Considering the traffic in Kampala it sounds like a plausible number. Other men have jobs, as vendors of anything you can think of selling, like electricity to charge your mobile phone, but car parts and other metals are favourite since they earn good money. Now and then they have a charcoal shop, but it is mainly women that do this job since it can be done from the house. Women have to stay close to their homes because they are most of the time responsible for cooking the food and cleaning the house as well as for taking care of the children if they do not go to school. Because of this they have jobs that can be exercised from home like selling charcoal or firewood, selling soap, drinks, paper, pencils and small packed food from small home shops, selling cooked food to schools in the neighbourhood or along the road, and selling tap water. Men never do the cooking (except for the one that I met whose mother and wife died), but now and then you meet man with a small shop or a charcoal shop. The reason might be that men can leave the house because they have little responsibility there and thus are able to do jobs in the city centre with which they earn more. Children go to school when parents or the parent is able to afford this, because school fees are relatively high and a uniform is mandatory. Some older children work, but since there is not much work they either hang in the neighbourhood or go begging for money on the streets. When the children are older or when women do not have children, the women sometimes have jobs a little further away from their houses. I met a woman who cooked at a school and I met a woman who had a hairdressing salon.

Mainly women do household management, since they spend most of their time at home and with their children. It is difficult to say that men have everything to say when it comes to money, but when a big purchase has to be done, it is the man that decides. Some of the people are house owners and have

46 tenants who give them a bit more income, others are tenants. Some women have to ask for money everyday, others have their own incomes, which they spend on food, fuel, rent and school fees. When I spoke to the women about their financial management I often found a gap between the money earned and the money spend. They spent a lot more that they earned. This might be because a lot of women were unable to tell what their husband eared, but some informants told me that either those women were not able to count or they were active as prostitutes but ashamed of it. They were able to tell me where the money was spent on, but this was only the money they spent. Many of those women told me that the money that was earned by their husband was spent on mobile phone charging and on alcohol. The alcohol abuse was, according to a lot of different informants, the reason many men died, leaving their wives and many children behind. Most of the households have a day-to-day management because the money that is earned in a day is often also spent in a day. If you have no money to save, there is not really a reason to have a financial management in your household. The women were not without dreams though. Many told me that if they had the money, they would save it for school fees, a new house or an upgrading of their current house, or a better stove. In two of the areas that I visited there were saving groups who were part of The Slum Dweller Federation/ACTogether. One of them was only for women; the other one was open for everyone in the area. One of the ladies was saving to build her house, which was already half way, another women was saving for the school fees of her children because she believed that this was the way to give them a better future. Apparently they were able to save a little amount of the money they and/or their husband earned. Many of the women in the saving groups that I spoke with did no longer have a husband, but they did not mention this fact as a reason for joining the saving group. According to the women that had introduced the idea of a saving group in the area were only women ware allowed to enter, this concept worked because you had to explain what you final goal was. When the women had defined their saving goal, they got their money only at the moment that they had reached the amount of money necessary to achieve their goal. This made it very difficult to spend your money on something else then you own goal. Men were not allowed because the women did not trust man with money. The founding women of the saving group laughed and said that man would only spent their money either on alcohol or cigarettes or other useless things, while women knew where the money was needed. The other saving group, situated in Kisenyi and also part of The Slum Dweller Federation/ACTogether, that allowed women as well as man was founded by a man, which already made it more logic that man could enter, but the saving group had also a higher goal. While they started as a standard saving group, they now were also getting funding from the government of Housing to build new houses on an empty area. One of the buildings was already finished; the other had only a foundation. Only members of the saving group could rent an apartment in the buildings, which made it more attractive to become a member of the group. Beside saving and building they were

47 also looking for ways of improving the slum by working together within their community. This was difficult they told me, because people were already busy and there was no starting capital to start something that could later help people earn money.

Since I had only contact with women in the slums of Kampala, except for the school principle and the head of the Slum Dwellers International Saving group, I can only tell how they experienced living in the slums. In many areas women helped each other and motivated each other to change their situation. They knew who their neighbours were and what they were doing and what their life stories were. People who worked in the slums also lived there. For Example the people of The Slum Dweller Federation/ACTogether, who had set up a plan to improve their own neighbourhood and tried to attract people from their neighbourhood to join. Many of the man were not involved, but this might have to do with the fact that they worked outside and with the idea that women had about men. Men would not be able to save; they would spend their money on alcohol and tobacco. In Kisenyi there were some man involved, but it were the women who took me out to show what they were doing and what they were saving for. The man in the organisation were chairman or in charge of the bookkeeping. The role of men and women is different in the communities, man are seen as head of the household, which basically means head of the money. When I was at a gender meeting organized by GIZ and attended by men and women, this was also the main conclusion. The problem, the people there argued, was that money was being spent on things that did not benefit the household. This was because since men started to feel that their role as head of the household was threatened they were spending money on drinking. This insecure feeling of man is, according to the people at the meeting, quit new and related to the empowerment of women.

Energy in the Slums When you walk through the slums of Kampala, energy technologies and types are in some ways very visual. Women cook on charcoal stoves and electricity wires hang above the small houses. Along the streets, stoves and charcoal are sold as well as bottles with a flammable liquid (probably paraffin). You can hear the noises of TV and radio, although TV’s are rare and mostly hang in small bars in the bigger streets. Since history, as is told me, women are the only ones cooking for the family and the men are working to earn money to maintain his family. The cooking energy they use is charcoal, or when they have absolutely no money, wood, but this is hard to gather in the slums. In Uganda cooking takes a whole day because of the food they eat, which needs a long time cooking. In the beginning this was confusing since I asked the women how often they cooked and all replayed with ‘once’. After I asked if they had no money to cook more often on a day they started to laugh, because they started cooking in the morning and finished cooking when the charcoal was finished.

48 They made more meals but cooked once. They could eat once or twice from the dish they made and some even had the money to cook for three meals. (I changed my questions after this) This was partly a habit, but people also cooked once a day because it is too expensive to reheat the food. You need extra fuel to reheat food; therefore cooking on charcoal is most effective. It is cheap and it stays warm for several hours. This habit makes that the women have to stay home and watch the fire and cannot leave the house for more then a few minutes. During those few minutes one of the neighbours will watch the fire. And although charcoal is the most effective fuel and the cheapest fuel they can get, it is still very expensive and the most part of the money women could spend was spend on this type of energy. There are even efficient ways of using charcoal, I learned from the women that when the charcoal is almost cold, you can break it and throw the ashes over the still burning parts, your fire can last for one or sometimes two more hours. And when you had to cook for a big family (more that the average 6 people) it was more efficient to use the metal stove since it was large and could handle larger pans. Besides cooking food, charcoal is also use for ironing. Ironing is even necessary in these areas because there are flies that lay their eggs in cloths hanging to dry. These eggs hatch and the maggot eats itself into the skin. Through ironing the maggot is killed. Kerosene or paraffin is expensive and only used to cook water or to light the house, although the last is often done with a candle since this is even cheaper. Firewood is heavy and stays wet for a long time after rain and hard to store, although the price is not that different from charcoal. Most households are not attached to the electricity network because they cannot afford the price, but some are and use it to watch television or listen to the radio. Some also light their houses with electricity, but it is not a very reliable energy source. It is mostly available during the day but when the evening drops in, power cuts are constantly following each other, so a candle, kerosene or charcoal is then more reliable. Electricity is never used for cooking, as are the other options. Not only because of the money issue or the availability but mainly because the way of cooking fits the fuel or the fuel fits the way of cooking. This might also be one of the reasons that people with more money do not change the cooking fuel. Other fuels are not effective and give another result then desired and the food that people eat in the slums is also the food that people eat in the richest areas of Kampala. The main Ugandan food called Matooke even needs a charcoal smoked flavour in order to be good to eat. If women have no money to buy charcoal, they can get a loan at a shop, this is something only the women can get. Or they go to a neighbour and borrow some, which they give back as soon as they are able to. One of the ladies I spoke told me that she would not lent money to women she did not know or to man, any man, since they definitely would not return the money. I met one woman that was already old, especially for Ugandan standards in slums, who had lost her three children and her husband and who had to take care of her six grandchildren. She could not work and was unable to buy food or fuel to feed her grandchildren. Women around her gave her food and fuel in exchange for watching their

49 children when they went away, or sometimes, when they had enough food and fuel for their own family they would give the extras to the lady. The fuel problems are not the same in every slum area, but the way fuel is used is not different. According to the people living in the slums, the cheapest way of cooking that fits their preferences is the way that they do it now. Logically, because if not they probably would have changed it. They use clay stoves because it is the cheapest option; low use of charcoal and cheapest stove there is. They use charcoal because it is the cheapest option; it is the cheapest fuel, it is light, small and easy to dry when it gets wet. The problem of the clay stoves, that all respondents acknowledged, was that the stoves break within two months because it is of bad quality and it cannot stand the rain. A broken stove can be used for several weeks Figure 4 Clay stoves in Kisenyi longer, but the heat does not stay in the stove and a lot more charcoal is necessary to cook the food and keep it warm. During the rainy season the stoves break even faster because when clay get wet it can get any other shape that a stove shape. In some of the slums they keep the stoves in side during the rainy season, but if you live in Bwaise, another slum area at the border of the city, keeping your stove inside is not enough. When the heavy rains arrive, twice a year for a month or even longer, the whole area gets flooded within minutes and houses are filled with one to two meters of dirty rainwater. The first thing to do is get the children save, mostly inside the houses on top of the furniture. Next thing is the save as much furniture and blankets. By then the stove is totally wet and is not the first priority at that moment. There was a stove that was made of metal, and I saw it now and then but rarely used. These stoves were rusty and fell almost apart. People did not like to use them because they had to use a lot of charcoal for these stoves in order to give heat and they were too big. I asked why they did not use a metal/clay stove, since this one would be more resistant to the water damage. These stoves are made of a clay carcass at the inside and a metal skin on the outside, besides they were build

Figure 5 Metal stoves in a house in in a way that made the air circles around in Kampala order to create total combustion. It lowers the

50 smoke emission, which is healthier and you create more heat with less charcoal than the other stoves.

Although they saw the benefit of a metal/clay stove, there were more disadvantages. The stove was almost four times as expensive as clay stoves and clay/metal stoves were bigger and could not keep the heat as easy as the clay stoves and thus needed more fuel to heat food. I found also small metal stoves, but they were indeed four times as expensive and had a design that would not keep the warmth inside the stove. Stoves are the most used items concerning cooking energy and although I found some other techniques to cook, charcoal is the only thing they use. One woman had an electrical cooking device, see fig. … It was some sort of hot plate, but she did not use it since electricity was needed and she was cut of. She was connected in the past but it was too expensive now, so she cooked on a normal charcoal stove. Besides for cooking, slum habitants use energy for Figure 6 Electric cooking ironing. They do this not on electricity but on charcoal and device for

lightening by candles or paraffin lamps. There are grid connections and some kind of meter connected to the houses that have an electricity connection. But there are a lot of loose hanging wires going to houses that have no meters. Almost no one actually told me that they used Figure 7 View over Kisenyi I electricity illegal, of course not, but there were signs. The cable hanging around and the lamps hanging on the ceilings of the houses while the residents claimed that they did not have electricity. One woman told me that she did not pay for the electricity she used, there was no one who controlled it anyway. Some people did pay, they told that ‘a man of the electricity comes every month and we pay him’, and since they had tenants they led them pay for electricity too. Those tenants did not get access to the electricity all the time, the women who showed me, showed a wire from her wire to the tenants house which she could connect and disconnect when she wanted. If the tenant did not pay the rent she would take down the wire until he did.

51 Paraffin is bought in bottle, often at the gas station and sometimes at small shops in the neighbourhood. It is not used much and many people told that the prices went up and that they started to use candles in stead. I asked many of them if they had ever heard of the Energy Week of the government, held once a year. I found no one who new what it was. I found some people who knew about the improved stove that saved charcoal, but that was all they knew about it. I explained all of them that the improved stove was promoted because it lasted longer en used less charcoal but provided the same heat for the same time as the stove they used now. They were interested and many asked where they could get it and what it cost. I knew the prices since I visited several stove makers, but where they could buy them? Even I had no idea because I had never seen a shop selling one of the improved stoves from the stove makers I had met. But the price was too high, according to everyone. Instead of 2000 shilling, they had to pay 15.000 or 20.000 shilling, something they did not had. The women of the saving groups reacted a little different and said that they would be able to save for this, but they first needed to see the thing in order to know it was good quality. Many asked if they could buy a stove on credit, but stove sellers already told me that this was not possible because they were not rich enough to sell stove on credit, they had their own family to support. One woman in Nalukolungo told me a funny story. She had heard on the radio that the government had created some new kind of energy type that would replace charcoal. This energy type was clean but still gave a matooke taste too the food. I don not think it really exists but it shows how important the matooke is in the food culture of Uganda. People did have opinions about the government and the actions they should take to improve the energy conditions in the areas. They argued that if the government wanted them to use something else, they had to give the people loans because the costs were to high to pay for technologies at once. Other argued that the government should give energy efficient stoves for free or that the government should create places where the stoves can be bought, since there were no such places close to the slums and moving out of the slums costs money. I also asked people if they knew any organisations that were active in their slums. In Kisenyi and Nakawa people new about The Slum Dwellers Federation or the saving groups but in the other areas I got no positive answer on the question. In the end people use many different forms of energy at once, they do not follow some path that is sometimes called ‘the energy ladder’; the idea that people move from using wood/charcoal to paraffin to electricity. The use what they can afford, but they also use what suits the practice. Even in non-slum areas where many people have electricity, people cook their meals on charcoal because they are use to it and because it gives the nice charcoal taste that makes food nice. There were differences, although small, between the slums that I visited. There were more women in Nalukolungo that I talked to who had electricity and in the area of Bwaise the water problems were more severe and caused more problems than in other areas.

52 F

Health Health is, like environment, an important aspect of energy, especially in the slums. Therefore I would like to address this shortly, especially since it shows something about the knowledge people have and what they do with it.

Many of the slum inhabitants are somehow aware of the fact that the smoke coming from the fire is not good for their health. Not many were able to name the health problems of the smoke, but when I asked the women why they preferred cooking outside, the

Figure 8 One of the slum kitchens

response was often related to health problems of them or their children. There were also many more reasons why they often did cook inside although they would prefer to cook outside. One of the ladies from the area of Nalukolungo (I Figure 9 Another kitchen mentioned her before) told me that she new that she was aware of the fact that it would be healthier to cook outside of her house, but that this was impossible. She was afraid of her neighbours putting poison in her food while she was not watching; therefore she was forced to cook inside. Also other women in Nalukolungo were giving this reason. But in the other areas the women told me this was just a fable, in their area that had never happened and they were not scared of their neighbours. They had other reasons to cook inside their homes. One of them was the rain, because you cannot cook in wet weather and wet charcoal takes time to dry and your stove will also

53 break when it gets wet. Another reason for cooking inside were young children running around outside. Many children in the slums suffer from severe flesh burns because they fell in a stove. When the stove is kept inside the changes of this happening is much smaller. So although people know that there is a problem of cooking inside their houses, they cannot name the direct consequences and also do not have a solution for the problem. Some were aware of the smoke reducing fuel saving stoves that were sold around the city, but no one could direct me to the place were they were sold or could tell me the price of such a stove. In these areas 90% of the population uses charcoal to cook their food, iron their cloths and boil their water. Although many of them know about the health risks coming from the smoke that is caused by this cooking habit, almost no one is changing this habit. My respondents often mentioned another aspect, related to health but not to energy. They talked about the attempts of NGOs about then years ago to create a cleaner environment for the slum areas. Many of those organisations had build toilets and place to dump waste at places that were not that convenient for the people who lived there. One woman who lived in Bwaise told me that they had build toilets on ground that belonged to landlords. Those landlords placed, as soon as the NGOs were gone, locks on the toilets and people had to pay to go there. Or they confiscated the toilet for own use since it was their land and thus their toilet. The woman explained that many people in the slums did not believe that either the government or another organisation could help them since they did not understand their lives.

Charcoal Sellers, Stove Sellers and Manufacturers and Energy Sellers in the Slums There are different stove sellers, some make their own stoves and sell them, other buy them from stove manufacturers and then sell them. In the slums in Kampala you can find both, although sellers are easier to find than manufacturers. I doubted if I should mention the company Ugastove in this chapter or in the chapter about policy since Ugastove is situated in one of the slums. But since it is sponsored by GIZ and has a close relation to GIZ and thus probably has some influence in the policy process, I decided to discuss it in the former chapter. Other examples of stove sellers are often one or two man companies that gathered clay en made this to the common clay stoves with an iron construction. I found one house where they made these, but the man (yes these were male) were not willing to talk because they had to work. The sellers of the stoves had more variation in their shops. They bought their products at Nakasero market, one of the biggest markets in Kampala, placed in the city centre next to the two taxi parks. I spoke to many sellers since they are easy to find and have the time to talk as long as they have no customers. The clay stove indeed was sold the most and they were aware of the negative effects of health and environment, but they could not afford to buy the most efficient stoves since no one would buy them anyway. These seller were, by the way, only women.

54 The charcoal sellers, man and women, were spread around the slums and were sometimes sitting next to each other. I asked them if they felt any competition from the sellers next to their own shop, but they argued that they had their own buyers and the prices were the same anyway. They had not ever thought about lowering their prices and selling more, because they were sold out most of the time anyway and if not, they used the charcoal for their own. On average people spend 3000 Shilling (one Euro) a day on food and 1500 Shilling a day on charcoal. If they had a kerosene lamp it would cost them 1000 a day to light the house during the evening or 500 if they would use candles. It was difficult to find out how much the family earned each day since the man often earned money. But most of the time the women guest it was between 3000 and 5000 a day unless business was very good and they could earn 10.000. School fees are high compared to what they earn. A semester for school costs between 20.000 and 75.000 Shilling (according to the women I spoke with). Some also had to pay rent between 15.000 and 25.000 Shilling a month and the electricity price lied between 10.000 and 30.000 a month for the ones that paid or had electricity. Analysis This group of actors, the slum inhabitants, are discussed in a separate chapter because they seem to be a separate group in the policy process. They seem to have nothing to do with policy because they live on the sides of society and are the poorest of the poorest who seem to have no voice. Interestingly, the women were most visible to me because they often stayed home during the day to cook and to take care of the children and to shop for groceries. The man were working and some of them only came home every five days or so to drop of some money. The women were all very different, but had also a lot of common habits, problems, and living conditions. I will discuss these differences and similarities below in an attempt to describe the social fields they act in. I will do this in the same line as the former chapter analysis, on the basis of McGee’s context of interaction and the realities approach of Long.

Most of the people that I spoke with had a rural background or spoke about their rural family members. This is probably of influence on their cultural habits, since those were partly different from what I had seen elsewhere in the city. It definitely influenced their cooking habits, although they were differently from rural cooking habits. When I asked them about their cooking habits and energy use they often referred to how people cooked in the rural area. There they cooked on wood, which was not possible in the slums because there was no space and no wood, therefore they cooked on charcoal, but wood would be an option if space and wood were available. They also linked cooking on wood with the poorest people, since gathering wood was the cheapest way to obtain energy products. Another historical influence was that of the former presence of NGOs and organisations that had tried to create a better situation for the people in the slums. Not all of the slums had experienced this influence, but Bwaise had been one of the main targets for organisations because the circumstances

55 seem to be worst at that place. In this area people were reluctant towards interviews and organisations that entered the slums since their experience was not positive.

I asked my respondents many questions that addressed their knowledge about energy and policies. With policies I did not get much response, most of them were not interested in the plans of the government or had already decided that it would not be implemented. When I asked them what they needed from the government in order to go and use electricity most of them responded with money. But many also argued that this was not a reliable energy source because of the constant power cuts and besides it reliability it did not live up to their needs. Electricity did not give the taste to food they needed from it and therefore charcoal was better, and it was cheaper. Many of the respondents knew about the risks of the smoke since they felt it in their lungs and their eyes, but there was not much they could do about it. They had no knowledge of improved stoves, unless they saw a picture, but then were not able to name places where they could buy such a stove and argued they could not afford a stove. But not all women responded like this. Some women, the women from saving groups or those who were active within ACTogether and the Slum Dwellers International had another answer towards my question on energy policy plans and energy use in the slums. They were aware of the new ways of brick making from waste and the new stoves that used less energy and emit less harmful gasses. There were differences in knowledge between the respondents which where probably related to the activities women were doing. Women who where active in saving groups and organisations that were active in improving the slum conditions were more aware of possibilities and worked towards a situation where they could benefit of these possibilities.

Many of the inhabitants brought parts of their habits and understanding, values and coping strategies from their former residents in the rural areas, other lived already for a long time in the slums. The strategies of earning money and taking care of families were often comparable. Cooking habits were focused on cooking food that needed a long cooking time and a charcoal taste, and were adapted to the financial possibilities they had. Culture here was a combination of rural practices and manners in adapted to the possibilities in the slums of the urban areas. Space was of influence on cooking habits but also on how people interact. Because they live so close to each other and with many families, it was easy to arrange babysitters and buy groceries on credit. Knowledge spread fast because of the layout of the space. When I entered an area, soon everyone knew my name and knew what I was doing. And when I asked about the improved stove it happened once that someone in that area had one. Everyone knew and they rapidly called her that she had to come over and tell me about it. Considering this, it is interesting that no one knew about the Energy Efficiency Week held by GIZ and the MEMD. You would assume that this information would spread fast.

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The space where they live in is mostly also the place where they lived, except for the men who go into town for their jobs. To women’s space is in their slum, they almost never leave because everything they need and can afford is there. Although my focus is on cooking energy, discussing this subject gave also an idea of how the structures and the realities in this part of the society live together. There is no clear infrastructure, probably because these areas are originally illegal settlements. But they have created their own structures of where to buy and who to ask and trust. They have structures to share knowledge and to deal with the daily problems. Some have access to other knowledge fields, but somehow this knowledge is not spread through the area. I got the feeling that some women were more powerful than others, this were often the women who where active in saving groups or organisations. These were the women people referred to in conversations and to whom I was send when I asked about energy or poverty or government plans.

Their rural background and their former experiences with NGOs and government promises influenced the realities of the female inhabitants of the slums of Kampala. The realities were also influenced by the way the space was structured because this limited cooking possibilities and influenced the way knowledge was shared. Culture was influenced by space and history, but it probably worked also the other way around. It was very difficult to expose power structures, since there were many people living in small areas, but what I noticed was that when you asked about knowledge you were send to the same women in the area. Thos women were connected to organisations or saving groups who had activities that were targeted on creating better living conditions. Through these organisations they had influence on what happened in the area. The organisation in Kisenyi was connected to government official who made it possible to build new houses in the area and this organisation was asked to do research to the problems in the area.

The next chapter will discuss all actors and the social fields they act in. It will discuss how their realities and knowledges overlap and differ. It will discuss the accessibility of these fields and it will show how the interfaces manifest themselves.

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Chapter 4 Analysis By discussing the actors of the energy policy field in Uganda and the slums of Kampala, several spaces became clear in which several actors are active. Some actors have access to more than one social field; some actors create a social field by their own, willingly or unwillingly. These fields are the spaces where the actors act in. Sometimes invisible borders bound these spaces, but other spaces are linked to certain places that set the borders for these spaces. This chapter will discuss the different spaces within the energy policy field and the slums of Kampala. It will also discuss the knowledge within these spaces and around these spaces, as well as knowledge sharing. The actors, knowledges and spaces are influenced by and influence the social power network, culture, history, and the political economy. These will be discussed too. All these factors show the different realities that people have and the battlefield of knowledge that arise due to different realities and thus will show where social field meet; where the interfaces are.

Social Field of the Government One of the social fields that can be recognized as a separate field is the government social field because it is accessible mostly for government actors, although GIZ is able together with CIM and the World Bank to influence certain rules. This social field of the government is responsible for the formulation of the policy. This formulation is influence by certain actors that have the power to access this field and influence the content. The colonial history as a big influence on this field, because that is where the fundaments of energy thinking in this field come from. The focus on electricity and its link with modernity and wealth was started with the Britain rulers and taken over by the Ugandan rulers and the World Bank. This last actor provided the government field with money intended for electricity distribution.

58 The knowledge in this field is also attracted from the colonial rulers and donors, but also from GIZ, the German organisation who works together with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development. Although the energy policy of 2002 focuses on electricity distribution and connection more people to this network; the renewable energy policy of 2007 shows the influence of GIZ through its attention towards small renewable energy technologies. The influence is still small, but this shows that GIZ does have influence in this social field. Even Mohammad of Ugastove, who wanted to be a part of the policy process but thought that he was not, is part of this social field. Government officials knew his name and new what he did and why his stove was important. They even used his stove during their Energy Efficiency Week, held once per year in the centres of Kampala. The discussion I had about the work ethic of Ugandan people showed a confidence on the highest power in the country. The president was supposed to take care of everything. This attitude might contribute to the lack of accountability within this field. There was, according to some of the respondents, no one who felt accountable for the implementation of the policy goals. The Uganda Electricity Distribution/Generation/Transmission Companies are controlled by the government and implement the electricity goals of the government within their power. Their role is not clear in this thesis, mainly because the information was only derived from their websites.

Social Field of Germans This heading might sound weird, but during my research I met a lot of Germans who were active in the energy field in Uganda. This was probably because GIZ and CIM were both from German origin and they delivered many actors to this field. This social field had another approach towards energy; its focus was more on small projects in cooperation with the poorer people in the society. They all combined their technical knowledge with the practical possibilities of the country. One of the actors that belongs to this field is the Uganda Carbon Bureau is a bit of a stranger within the field because this actor argues that it want nothing to do with the government, while all other actors have intensive relations with government departments. All actors in this field have scientific/expert knowledge about the technologies available and the possibilities of subsidies. But they all seem to have trouble bringing this information to the small organisations that want this information. They gave contact with these organisations. One of the examples is BEETA, an organisation that brings together the stove builders to share knowledge and to look for subsidies. But is seemed difficult to transfer the knowledge, although it was not clear why. This field has to fight the idea that electricity distribution cause modernity and wealth in order to get access to the social field of the government. But what do they have to overcome to transfer their knowledge to the social field of small local organisations? The actors within this field work together and do not have, except for the Uganda Carbon Bureau, a profit they want to earn. These actors look at energy in potentials and try to create technologies that fit the country and influence the climate in a positive way.

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Social Field of Small Local Organisations and an Italian Stove Builder I have talked with several small local organisations like PETSD, BEETA, and ACTogether. All of them had contact with the Germans and/or with government departments. This field is wide spread, and many actors are able to access this social field. Most of the actors are organisations that are active in the slum areas or are active as technology producers with technologies that are created to benefit the poorest in the country and the environment. Some of the actors are slum inhabitants themselves, other have lived in the slums or are familiar with slum life. They know about the struggles in the slums because they have seen or experienced it themselves. Some have had higher education and have some scientific and technical knowledge on the techniques to build stoves and other environment friendly techniques. Energy for them is either a source of income or a improvement goal within their own environment, or both. They all acknowledge that they need more knowledge and start-up capital to accomplish their goals. Problem is that they do not know where to get the knowledge and how to get the capital. All had thus a financial and knowledge struggle, something that was also mentioned the government field but was not heard within the social field of the Germans. Although the amount of money that the government field was looking for was larger that the financial gab the small organisations struggled with, both acknowledge that this is a problem. The knowledge gab is different; while the government field looks for data of energy use, the small organisations want technical knowledge on new techniques. There is however one link that bridge this knowledge gab. The Slum Dwellers International who were working together with one of the government departments; the department delivered building material and knowledge on how to build the houses, the organisations provided the department with data on Kisenyi. These connections were not made with the MEMD but seem to be possible. Why is the lack of knowledge so hard to overcome? This field has access to knowledge that the government field needs. The field of Germans have the knowledge this field needs and might have the money too. The German field probably benefits if the government acquires the data it needs to start implementing renewable energy goals. So what goes wrong?

Social Field of the Slums The actors in this field are the poorest people in Uganda and their priority in life is to earn enough money to feed their children and send them to school. For them energy is charcoal, candles, and paraffin and if they are lucky some electricity from the grid network. Some of the inhabitants work for small organisations like ACTogether and the Slum Dwellers International, but most of them have jobs as boda-boda drivers or hairdresser. Their knowledge of energy comes from their experiences. They have chosen the best stove by testing them in their environment with the financial possibilities they have. They are willing to start using

60 electricity, although not for cooking, when the government makes it financial possible. This also applies for the improved stoves. They also struggle with finance and many of them argue that the government should help them. Although this social field seems to be very open to everyone, it is in fact a very closed social field for the other social fields within the energy policy field. Data for the government is hard to obtain because there are so many people living there and the structure of the areas is not clear to outsiders. The Germans are focused on the rural areas, but even if they wanted to start with projects in the urban areas it is difficult to say where to start since the area is big and the people are reluctant towards outsiders who come and help considering their past experience with this kind of help. The small organisations do have contact with the slum inhabitants and sometimes belong to this social field. They are the only social field that does have projects in these areas but the success is small, often because of the financial position of the inhabitants.

Conclusion This thesis describes the actors and their realities in the social field of energy policy in Uganda. It is clear that within these field there are smaller fields/spaces that have their own realities about energy and their own strategies towards energy. These fields are connected with each other through the actors that act within the fields. Some actors are active in different fields or walk in and out of the fields. In all of the fields there is a certain need; knowledge, money, power. Some of the fields have more needs and those needs are not fulfilled.

The goal of this thesis is to explore where the interfaces, described by Norman Long, manifest themselves and in what way they are manifested. Simply said; social interfaces are the places where social field or social systems meet. Long argues that these interfaces show discontinuities that are based on different values and social interest. These discontinuities are visible in the social field of energy policy of Uganda.

One of this meeting points of social fields is described above, when the actors in the social system of the Germans, the government, and of the small organisations did meet during the BEETA meeting. During this meeting the small organisations expressed their need for knowledge and money in order to make the stoves that GIZ like to see circulation through the country. The government actor that speached at the end of the meeting praised the meeting and promised its support, not by money but by helping organising this meeting. Although all the actors met, a exchange on knowledge/money/power or any need that the other had, did not take place.

Another meeting point of social fields is shown in the neighbourhood Kisenyi. The Slum Dwellers Federation, together with ACTogether, has set up, with the help of government departments, projects

61 to improve the living conditions of the people in the slums. This is a meeting point of three social fields that has been successful in building new houses. But the houses are not finished yet due to lack of money and slow processes at the government side. There is interest in energy use improvement from the side of ACTogether, but priorities of the government and the slum inhabitants are different. The government focuses on electricity connections in rural areas and the slum inhabitants give priority to food and school fees.

Slum inhabitants express the need for good stoves that are affordable and grid electricity that is reliable and affordable. The Germans are aware of the fact that these stoves are the solution for the moment and try to implement renewable techniques in rural areas. The government main goal is to provide everyone with grid electricity in a renewable way. Other renewable technologies do not have priority because the government wants to see their effect in other countries before implementing it in their country. The World Bank wants to fight poverty with the spread of grid electricity and created money available to make this happen. On the other hand, The Uganda Carbon Bureau argued that if they can sell enough stoves, they could eventually give them away for free because of the carbon credits they earn with this. So theoretically it would be possible to sell stoves for the price that the slum inhabitants can afford without the help of the government.

What is happening? Although GIZ works closely with the government and is aware of the needs of the slum inhabitants, the government keeps focussing on electricity. The World Bank has provided money for the hydropower projects in Uganda and has in this way influenced the policy. If there is money to realize something, this has priority. GIZ does not have the money and this makes it more difficult to get their priorities on the agenda. The World Bank and GIZ have different values and interests and they meet in the government field where they both want a spot in the policy. Clearly the World Bank has more power at the moment because they have the financial resources, but GIZ works its way into the policy with words.

McGee argues for the acknowledgement of the social processes within the policy field because she believes that policy is influenced by power dynamics and relationships within the social processes. This thesis has discussed the many complex social processes of the energy policy field in Uganda. It has shown that indeed these social processes are influenced by power and knowledge, history and space, culture and political economy. It has shown that policy influenced by actors in different ways. Most decisions are political said my supervisor, and he is right, every decisions made depends on the relationships actors have with other actors. The slum inhabitants might have not the right relationships yet to influence the decisions made in the government field. But, on the other hand, the government does not have the right relationship either do influence the choices people make in the slums.

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