I published an op-ed in Cœur d’Afrique, a news outlet based in Kinshasa, on 19 October 2026 in its Territories section. It starts from a Kinshasa neighbourhood where the power now comes on only two days a week.

In brief

• A neighbourhood without cold. In Kinsuka-Pêcheur, in the commune of Ngaliema, Radio Okapi reported on 12 September 2026 that power was coming back only two days a week, and had been for more than a month. A SNEL employee blamed the outages on a cable that serves several substations at once. I picture a shopkeeper, Grâce Mbuyi, who sells cold drinks and mpiodi, frozen horse mackerel: on days without power she sells it off from noon and throws away what is left in the evening.
• What intermittent power costs. Patrick Kankonde (University of Kinshasa) and Pitshou Bokoro (University of Johannesburg) surveyed 385 Kinshasa households, who rate the quality of their power 5 out of 10 on average. Each point gained cuts the odds of an illegal connection by about a third.
• My proposal. A shared cold room run by a cooperative of vendors. Each vendor rents a space by the day and pays only for what they store. A manager keeps the register, the price of a space stays below the value of the goods it saves, and solar panels keep it running on blackout days. For SNEL, it would be a single customer, easy to connect and to bill.
• Precedents. In Nigeria, the company ColdHubs installs solar cold rooms in markets. According to its founder, in 2018 users paid about 100 naira per crate per day, produce stayed fresh for 21 days instead of 2, and the income of more than 300 users had nearly doubled. In Goma, a study (Thompson et al., 2024) finds that a solar mini-grid gives small businesses more hours of power and a steadier voltage than the public grid, at a higher cost.
• The law allows it. Article 48 of the Constitution guarantees the right of access to electricity, and Article 204 reserves to the provinces the exploitation of non-nuclear energy sources, solar included, as I noted in my paper for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès. Kinshasa, which has the status of a province, can therefore back a market cold room together with SNEL, the commune of Ngaliema and traders’ associations.

On 7 October 2026, the DR Congo and the FAO signed their Country Programming Framework for 2025-2029, which aims to reduce the country’s dependence on food imports. A neighbourhood cold room serves that goal on a small scale.

→ Read the op-ed in Cœur d’Afrique