Nexans leading the charge of electrifying Africa by bringing electricity to rural communities in Cote d'Ivoire

Nexans has brought electricity to 35 rural communities across Côte d'Ivoire by delivering a turnkey, ready-to-use power infrastructure solution. The project, carried out within the framework of the country’s National Rural Electrification Program (PRONER), is part of Nexans’ wider ambition to help provide safer, reliable, and connected access to electricity for a better future.

In the past decade, Côte d'Ivoire has made significant progress towards electrification. In 2013, only 34 percent of the population of 25 million had access to electricity. Today, that figure is close to 70 percent. Yet rural electrification remains an issue as over 60 percent of the country’s rural communities still have no electricity supply.

The PRONER project aims to increase rural electrification in Côte d'Ivoire through grid expansion. The plan is to connect all settlements with more than 500 inhabitants this year, and all the rural communities by the end of 2025.

Nexans’ contribution to the project has enabled a significant step forward in providing electricity to thousands of people with public lighting systems and network connections between individual houses and the existing high voltage power grid. The approach adopted by Nexans has extended well beyond supplying individual components. Instead, it has deployed the NEOGRID® turnkey solution encompassing engineering, supply and installation of the power network and including cables, transformers, poles, junction boxes and circuit-breakers.

“At Nexans we have adopted a very practical approach to supporting Africa’s transition to a more connected and sustainable energy network. In Côte d'Ivoire this is based on two inter-related pillars,” said Damien Simon, Marketing & Strategy Director for Building & Territories segment at Nexans. “First, in 2018, we opened our new Abidjan plant to help address the lack of suitable equipment and products for electrification by enabling local production based on our international and standardized expertise. Now we have taken the next step by rolling out products from the plant as part of our turnkey solution to bring electricity to rural communities.”

With the goal of electrifying 50 communities, this will involve 400 km of aerial medium-voltage (MV) cables and over 430 km of low-voltage (LV) aerial-bundled cables as well as the installation of 63 outdoor transformers. All of the critical equipment was manufactured or supplied by the Nexans plant in Abidjan.