The Democratic Republic of Congo is located in Central Africa and is home to over 80 million people. The country is rich in raw minerals and supplies over a third of the world’s cobalt and nearly 30% of the world’s diamonds. Despite its vast natural richness, just about fifteen percent of the country’s citizens have access to electricity.

The desperate need to electrify the country’s households cannot be overstated. Few years back, the government of DRC announced a grand plan to build the world’s largest hydroelectric dam – the Inga 3 project that, along with subsequent phases of dam construction, could eventually contribute 40 GW of electricity. Backers of the project claim that these projects alone could contribute to as much as 40 percent of Africa’s energy needs.

But this is easier said than done. The current phase of the project alone is expected to displace as many as 35,000 people and bring about immense environmental damage to the tropical rainforests in the region. While arguments have been made for and against the project that is expected to take five years to complete, the more important concern here is the delay that such issues bring. Truth be told, no megaproject as big as this can be successfully executed without displacing people or affecting the environment. So each time governments across the world set off to launch projects as these, the mere bureaucracies surrounding the execution could delay and hinder the development of the people from the region. For countries in Africa, such delays could be the reason why another generation of people may continue to live in poverty.

According to Benedict Peters, the billionaire founder of the Aiteo Group and among the richest men in Africa, one of the most effective solutions to the energy crisis in the continent is microgeneration. In an Op-Ed on the Huffington Post, Benedict Peters writes that the energy problem in Africa “will not be solved by a reliance on massive, load-bearing generation plants. They take a long time to bring on-grid, cost an astonishing amount of money to construct and rarely benefit the rural and hard-to-reach communities that need them the most.”

By definition, microgeneration refers to the set up of small scale electricity generation systems that can provide power to small group of individuals, businesses or communities. Evidence points to the effectiveness of microgeneration in bringing electricity to the poorest people. Unlike centralized power generation systems, microgenerators do not require large swathes of lands – this eliminates the need to displace people or cut down trees. Such small power generators can often be set up on empty lands close to the community. Also, thanks to the proximity of these generators to the consumers, the transmission costs are brought down significantly.

Such microgeneration systems are in fact ideal for countries like DRC that clock nearly 1740 hours of sunlight each year. The cost of solar panels have plummeted in recent years and this offers an opportunity for communities across the country to set up power generation systems in their villages and start benefitting from them months from now, rather than years.

What really is stopping these communities from investing in these technologies is access to capital. Many of the microgeneration projects across the world today are funded either by NGOs or by the communities themselves. It has been assumed all along that such microgenerators are merely a stop-gap arrangement and communities require centralized electricity distribution systems in the long-term. Not surprisingly, the billions of dollars invested worldwide in setting up electricity generation systems have always focused on these long term projects.

But this line of thought fails to account for the improvement in living standards that access to electricity brings. The mere ability to recharge your phone or run a water pump can bring about a dramatic improvement in the living standards of people. Such improvements have a compounding effect on poverty alleviation. In other words, the living standards of people touched by such microgeneration plants could be vastly higher by the time a mega hydroelectric plant generates its first unit of power.

Electricity tends to pay itself back through improved productivity among people. The need of the hour is then to identify solutions that can generate power now rather than several years from now. It only makes sense for governments in Africa and the many impoverished countries in Asia and other parts of the world to invest their billions in setting up microgeneration plants. These countries may look at long-term solutions at a later time when the need for such solutions arise.