In 2022, INE carried out a sample survey in cooperation with Statistics Norway between April and June to document the impact of modern energy sources, related to economic activity and human well-being of households and communities.

Mozambique has a population of 31,794,791 inhabitants, of whom 15,370,727 are men and 16,624,064 are women, according to population projections for 2022.

The IASES collected data from 6,367 households out of the 6,486 sampled from the whole country.

The extrapolated results of the survey covered 6,833,550 households. The average household has 4.5 members.

Almost half of the population aged six and over (45.2 per cent) has completed primary school, the highest level, followed by secondary school (27.1 per cent), no schooling completed (23.6 per cent), and higher education (3.2 per cent).

Agriculture, animal production, forestry, hunting and fishing are the main economic activities of the economically active population.

Regarding access to and connection to electricity, 50.1 per cent of households in Mozambique have access, 32.0 per cent through the electricity grid and 18.1 per cent through other sources. This means that 49.9 per cent of households have no connection to the grid or other electricity solutions. Lack of access to electricity is most common in rural areas (86.8 per cent), Tete province (84.7 per cent) and Zambezia (83.3 per cent). The few households with electricity in rural areas have usually access through solar energy (85.3 per cent), rechargeable batteries (74.9 per cent) and dry cell batteries (71.4 per cent), compared to urban areas that use electricity from the national grid (72.2 per cent) and electric generators (58.3 per cent).

Around 73 per cent of households charge their mobile phone at home, of which Maputo City has the highest percentage (95.9 per cent).

As for general levels of access to electricity, the following stand out:

  • For capacity, 56.9 per cent of households use electricity with access to less than 3 Watts (W), or use less than per day or less than 12 Watt-hour (Wh), or have no access to electricity, mainly in Tete (78.0 per cent), Cabo Delgado (76.0 per cent), Zambézia (67.8 per cent), Nampula (67.0 per cent) and Niassa (65.6 per cent). 34.0 per cent of households in Mozambique have access to at least 2 kW or a daily consumption of at least 8.2 kWh. They can mainly be found in Maputo City (97.8 per cent) and the provinces of Maputo (72.6 per cent) and Gaza (59.1 per cent).
  • For availability, 93.6 per cent of consumers have electricity available for at least 23 hours a day.
  • In terms of quality, 78.6 per cent of consumers have not experienced any problems with interruptions that have damaged household appliances. However, 21.4 per cent of consumers experienced power interruptions that damaged household appliances, particularly in the urban area (24.3 per cent), Maputo City (39.6 per cent), Sofala (27.4 per cent), Maputo (26.5 per cent) and Zambezia (22.0 per cent) provinces.
  • In terms of the reliability of the energy supplied, 65.9 per cent of consumers experience more than fourteen power cuts a week, with Manica, Inhambane and Maputo City provinces standing out with more than 80 per cent of households in this situation.
  • In terms of affordability, 63.0 per cent of consumers spend more than 5 per cent of their annual income on electricity.
  • In terms of legality, almost all consumers pay their electricity supplier (96.7 per cent). However, the provinces of Zambézia (15.6 per cent) and Niassa (13.9 per cent) have the highest percentage of consumers who do not pay for electricity consumption.
  • For health and safety, almost all electricity consumers (99.0 per cent) have never suffered an accident related to electrical installation, connection, maintenance and repairs. However, 2.6 per cent of consumers in Cabo Delgado and 2.2 per cent in Gaza have suffered some serious or fatal injury as a result of unsafe electrical interventions.

With regard to overall access to fuel and clean energy technologies, 40.3 per cent of households have access to sustainable energy, with a greater deficit in rural areas (24.8 per cent) compared to urban areas (72.7 per cent). Thus, with regard to levels of cooking technologies, there are:

  • Approximately 72 per cent of households use low convenience cooking to make food, i.e. every 7 days they spend more than 7 hours acquiring fuel for cooking and more than 15 minutes preparing the stove for cooking.
  • Around 95 per cent of households use a safe main cooker, i.e. no accidents linked to the cooker in the last 12 months.
  • Almost all households spend more than 5 per cent of their annual income on cooking fuel, the situation being most serious in Maputo City (99.4 per cent), Maputo (93.9 per cent) and Niassa (92.1 per cent) provinces.
  • 91.0 per cent of households have experienced lack of access to cooking fuel over the last 12 months, more so in rural areas (94.0 per cent) than in urban areas (84.8 per cent).
  • In terms of the impact of access to energy, the following stand out:
  • For livelihoods, there is a small decrease in "landless" households for agriculture, a slight increase in the extent of cultivated area and small ruminant animals among households with access to electricity relative to households without access to electricity. However, the larger the size of the cultivated area, the percentage of households with access to electricity at the highest levels of access tends to decrease.
  • For main occupation, , the number of heads of households with access to electricity increased slightly among workers in the private sector compared to households without access.

In terms of ownership of goods, households with access to electricity have increased slightly over the last 5 years, especially in the case of television sets and computers.

  • As for businesses, both in communities with access to energy (82.4 per cent) and those without (78.1 per cent), the majority have been running businesses for more than 5 years.
  • As for education, 24.0 per cent of households with access to electricity with children aged 5-14 use solar energy for homework, compared to 1.0 per cent of households without access to electricity. More than two-thirds of households with access to electricity have their children study homework during the day, as opposed to 85.6 per cent of households without access.
  • With regard to public lighting and safety, 22.1 per cent of households with access to electricity have street-lights, compared to 5 per cent of households without access to public lighting. Around 86.1 per cent of households with in areas with street-lights have public lighting on at night.
  • Regarding safety on the streets, 18.8 per cent of households live in neighbourhoods with night-time police patrols. Urban areas have a higher percentage of households living in streets with police patrols (28.2 per cent) than the rural area (14.3 per cent).
  • More than 60 per cent of households with access to electricity feel completely safe walking alone at home and in public places during the day, but 41.4 per cent of households do not feel safe walking alone at night. For households without access to electricity, 36.6 per cent do not feel safe walking alone at night.

Regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the perceptions of households, the following stand out:

  • 26.2 per cent of households engaged in agriculture, animal production, forestry, hunting and fishing, decreased their income compared to 5.9 per cent of households engaged in non-agricultural business activities.
  • 30.8 per cent of households decreased their income, 17.0 per cent decreased consumption and 4.1 per cent sold assets because of the global pandemic.