Open Licences and Community Ownership: Off-Grid Solar and Mini-Grids for Diverse African Settings

By Ahmed Odefunso

ABSTRACT

This article examines open-source solar and mini-grid systems and low-cost, repairable hardware across diverse African settings. It draws a careful distinction between open licensing—the legal status of designs, schematics, and firmware—and community ownership, which concerns who controls and benefits from infrastructure. The analysis reviews technical and safety standards, financial and business models, and maintenance challenges, alongside the opportunities that open designs create for local repair and reduced vendor lock-in. It argues that open licensing is a necessary but insufficient condition for durable, locally governed energy access, and that safety standards, financing, and skills remain decisive constraints. The article avoids blanket claims and treats regulatory and market conditions as highly varied.

INTRODUCTION Solar mini-grids—comprising solar photovoltaic generation, battery storage, and a distribution network—are increasingly recognised as a scalable pathway to electricity access for communities beyond the reach of national grids. Enthusiasm for “open-source” approaches has grown, promising to overcome vendor lock-in, reduce costs, and improve local maintainability. Yet the phrase conflates two distinct ideas. Open licensing determines whether schematics and code may be studied, modified, and manufactured locally; community ownership determines who governs assets and captures value. This article keeps the two separate and assesses opportunities and limitations with reference to the evidence.

BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW

Technical architecture and standards There is currently no single, unified open-source technical standard for mini-grids in Sub-Saharan Africa; the sector is characterised by a “void of standardisation and certifications” [4]. Instead, developers rely on a mix of national regulations, international best practice, and internal tools [4]. The African Electrotechnical Standardization Commission has published AFSEC Guide 08: 2024, technical guidelines for installing photovoltaic mini-grids, covering systems with nominal continuous output between 3 kW and 1000 kW [1]. The guide mandates adherence to international standards for battery safety, including IEC 62619 for secondary lithium cells in industrial applications and IEC 62485 for battery installation safety, and addresses lightning protection via surge arresters, earthing, and overcurrent protection [1].

Open-source initiatives Several open-source initiatives have emerged. OpenAMI—a collaboration involving Renewable Energy Innovators Cameroon, IEEE Smart Village, and EnAccess—is developing an open-source Advanced Metering Infrastructure with an OEM-agnostic stack allowing operators to manage meters from different manufacturers under a single, locally hosted control station [3]. NuruGrids Africa develops open-source gateway hardware enabling local manufacturing and maintenance [3]. Software platforms include MicroPowerManager, a customer-management system for mini-grid utilities, and the OpenPAYGO Token, a standardised, interoperable protocol used across pay-as-you-go manufacturers [3]. Libre Solar, initiated in 2016 by Martin Jäger and supported in part by the EnAccess Foundation, provides an open-source Battery Management System; its BMS C1 supports 3 to 16 lithium cells in series for 12V, 24V, and 48V systems, handles 70–100A, and is licensed under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 for hardware and Apache 2.0 for firmware [2].

Financing and productive use Financial sustainability is frequently challenged by high upfront costs and the limited purchasing power of rural customers [5]. Productive use of energy—income-generating activities such as agro-processing, milling, ice-making, cold storage, water treatment, and electric mobility—is identified as a critical success factor [5]. Integrating anchor loads can reduce the levelised cost of electricity by up to 50 per cent compared with systems serving only residential users [5]. The Anchor-Business-Community strategy sequences an energy-intensive anchor customer, local small businesses, and residential consumers [5]. Concessional funding, results-based financing, and contracts such as Power Purchase Agreements and Operating Services Agreements remain important [5]. Modern “third-generation” mini-grids are characterised by high uptime, sometimes exceeding 99 per cent, with smart metering and remote monitoring [5].

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Open licensing is not community ownership The central analytical point is that open licensing and community ownership are distinct. Libre Solar's CERN Open Hardware Licence makes schematics legally available [2], and NuruGrids' open hardware “enables local manufacturing and maintenance” [3]—but legal openness does not by itself determine who owns or governs an installed mini-grid. Ownership and governance are addressed separately in the literature, for example through tripartite agreements between operators, utilities, and communities [4], and through “product-as-a-service” or leasing models that keep assets with providers while incentivising long-term performance [3]. A system can be built from openly licensed components yet be owned by a private developer; conversely, a community-owned grid can rely on proprietary hardware. Conflating the two risks overstating what open licences achieve.

Maintenance, repairability, and e-waste The strongest case for open designs concerns maintenance. Proprietary, imported components are difficult to repair locally, manufacturers often prioritise cost and energy output over modularity, and most rural regions lack formal supply chains for spare parts, certified testing laboratories, or accredited repair centres [3]. Rapid deployment has created an emerging solar e-waste challenge, as many low-cost devices have short lifespans [3]. Open-source designs, by providing publicly available schematics and code, can empower local technicians to repair rather than replace, supporting “circular” strategies: modular, non-toxic, standardised components; accredited repair centres; second-life batteries; and training programmes such as those associated with the Circular Economy Powered Renewable Energy Centre [3]. Open documentation supports these programmes by giving technicians the schematics needed to diagnose faults [3].

Safety and quality limitations Openness must coexist with rigorous safety and quality standards. AFSEC's guidelines mandate lightning protection, earthing, overcurrent protection, and compliance with IEC 62619 and IEC 62485 for lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries [1]. IRENA cautions that mini-grids are complex systems that should not be treated as a simple sum of parts, requiring comprehensive system-level testing; the combination of physical hardware with digital simulation allows developers to test control functionalities without building a full, expensive pilot [3]. The absence of a unified standard and a noted scarcity of skilled technical workers mean that open hardware does not relieve developers of safety obligations—it may, if poorly governed, complicate quality assurance [4].

Financial and maintenance constraints Financial viability remains a binding constraint. Residential consumption in rural areas is often low, so productive use is essential to reach the revenue needed for sustainability [5]. Yet a lack of specialised technical capacity persists, and training local youth and women in installation, operation, and maintenance is identified as necessary for local value chains and project longevity [5]. Regulatory environments are diverse; licensing can be slow, sometimes exceeding 58 weeks, which limits scaling across markets [5]. The Africa Minigrid Developers Association advocates simplified and “bulk” licensing, standardised key performance indicators, and clear grid-interconnection procedures, noting that frameworks were largely designed for centralised utilities and are ill-suited to decentralised mini-grids [4]. Interoperability is a related concern: historical vendor lock-in restricted operators to specific spare parts and proprietary software, which open, OEM-agnostic stacks seek to address [3].

Opportunities, bounded by evidence The opportunities are real but conditional. Open, interoperable metering and management can reduce lock-in and lower maintenance costs [3]; openly licensed hardware such as Libre Solar's BMS can be adapted or manufactured locally [2]; and productive use can transform mini-grids from basic lighting into economic engines, with documented examples such as ice manufacturing supporting fisheries in Uganda [5]. Empirical studies in Kenya and Nigeria report income growth and improved quality of life as households shift away from hazardous sources such as kerosene [4]. These findings should not be generalised across all settings; regulatory, market, and resource conditions vary substantially.

A practical implication is that procurement and project design should treat openness as a set of verifiable properties rather than a label. Questions worth asking include whether schematics and firmware are published under a recognised licence, whether components are available through local supply chains, whether documentation is sufficient for a trained technician to diagnose faults, and whether the governance arrangements give the community a meaningful say in tariffs, maintenance and expansion. Each of these can be assessed independently, and each addresses a different part of the problem described above.

The limits of the evidence should also be acknowledged. Much of the material reviewed comes from sector bodies, development institutions and project developers, whose reports are valuable but often describe selected projects or aggregate benchmarks rather than independent, long-run evaluations of open-source deployments specifically. Claims about reduced lock-in or lower maintenance costs are plausible and consistent with the sources, yet they warrant further empirical testing across different countries, regulatory regimes and community structures. Until such evidence accumulates, a measured position is the most defensible: open designs are a promising enabler, not a substitute for sound engineering, finance and governance.

CONCLUSION Open-source solar and mini-grid technologies offer genuine advantages for repairability, interoperability, and local value creation, and they can support circular-economy approaches to a growing e-waste challenge [3]. But open licensing is not the same as community ownership, and neither guarantees safety, financing, or skills. Durable energy access in diverse African settings depends on the convergence of openly documented, modular hardware with robust safety standards such as AFSEC's guidelines [1], viable business models anchored in productive use [5], clear regulation and interconnection rules [4], and sustained investment in local technical capacity [5]. Open designs are best understood as one enabling element within a larger, still-maturing system.

REFERENCES [1] African Electrotechnical Standardization Commission. AFSEC Guide 08: 2024, Technical Guidelines for the Installation of Photovoltaic Mini-Grids. https://afsec-africa.org [2] Libre Solar. BMS C1 open-source battery management system documentation. https://github.com/LibreSolar/bms-c1 [3] EnAccess Foundation. Open-source tools for energy access (OpenAMI, MicroPowerManager, OpenPAYGO). https://enaccess.org/materials/ [4] Africa Minigrid Developers Association. Benchmarking Africa's Minigrids 2024. https://africamda.org [5] World Bank / ESMAP. Mini Grids for Half a Billion People: The Report. https://www.esmap.org/mini_grids_for_half_a_billion_people_the_report