Our Members: Edo Abraham

Edo Abraham is a senior Associate Professor of Water & Control Systems Engineering and Head of the Water Systems Engineering section at Delft University of Technology. Much of his work focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa, where new water and energy infrastructures must be built at unprecedented rates to meet demand. Working closely with different stakeholders, Edo develops decision support tools for optimising water and energy infrastructure plans and their operations. His multi-scalar work spans water-access mapping and urban water supply management, multipurpose reservoir systems, and national water-energy planning. Edo leads the Water Security flagship at TU Delft’s Climate Safety & Security Centre (CaSS) and coordinates EPIC Africa, working in partnership with multiple African institutions. His recent work is explicitly values-driven: he argues that Africa’s future must be shaped by context-relevant evidence and participatory ownership of decisions, a conviction that also underpins his role at AISESA. 

What first drew you to questions of African water and energy systems, and what do you believe good engineering should serve at their intersection? 

I was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, so questions of development in Africa and the role of energy and water systems have always felt personal rather than abstract. Still, my path to working on them professionally was not a straight line. My interest in sustainability and energy goes back to graduate school: my PhD research at Imperial College London focused on the control of wave energy conversion, and alongside it I cofounded and led its Energy Society. For my postdoc, I planned to deepen my systems theory expertise in energy or other sustainability-related research. Instead, I was persuaded to work on urgent urban water infrastructure problems in the UK: leakage management and optimising energy use in water supply networks through control and the planning of new network topologies. That detour became a calling. Working on the control co-design of urban supply networks, I found myself pulled towards questions of water and energy access, and urban development in Africa.  

"... If countries cannot provide basic services such as water and electricity reliably and affordably, all talk of development is merely rhetoric. "

When I was growing up, Addis Ababa was a much smaller city that rarely had water supply interruptions; today, scheduled supply of once every two to seven days is common in parts of the city. Across rapidly growing urban sub-Saharan Africa, water service provision is much worse in smaller towns, peri-urban areas and rural settings, and there is a parallel geographic inequality in energy access, with its own last-mile challenges. For me, if countries cannot provide basic services such as water and electricity reliably and affordably, all talk of development is merely rhetoric; over time, closing that gap has become something of an obsession. It was therefore natural to address the broader questions of water-energy systems planning and access, especially once I began working closely with African partners through projects. My current work at TU Delft explores both large-scale investment needs at national and transnational levels and place-based, transdisciplinary research for water security in secondary cities across sub-Saharan Africa. 

Although my work builds advanced mathematical models and optimisation algorithms to enable infrastructure investment planning, the engineering is only as good as the social and economic development it is designed to serve. What I’ve come to believe is that good engineering at the water-energy intersection has to serve people’s actual needs, dignified lives and improved livelihoods, not only headline targets like the SDGs. This is why I also co-teach the course “Engineering for Global Development” at TU Delft, where I host a session critiquing the SDGs and iterating them with our engineering students, using specific African contexts as starting points for exploring SDG 6.1 and the barriers to improved access. With questions of water and energy access, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to import to a country; for me, systems have to be built around the resources available and the context-specific ways people live and work, and decisions must be locally owned. 

Your recent article calls for a shift in how we think about energy needs. What changes when planning starts from that fuller picture of people’s lives? Is there an example from practice that captures this? 

The article (co-authored with colleagues Anteneh Dagnachew and Nicolò Stevanato) argues for reframing rural energy planning in SSA so that households are not seen solely as consumers of basic electricity, but as productive economic units, particularly through agriculture-linked household enterprises. In most planning, success is measured by connection counts for low-tier access (i.e. enough for lighting and phone charging). That misses the energy people need to improve their livelihoods: irrigation, crop processing, small enterprise. The fuller picture means asking the older political-economy questions of who gets what and what they do with it: in this case, who uses energy, how much, and for what, and how that would change as their lot improves. It then means designing from those answers. 

A good example we use in the paper is Matembwe Village in Tanzania, where a mini-hydro system was deliberately designed to power poultry feed production, milling and cold storage alongside homes. Because the productive uses were planned from the start, the system achieved higher utilisation, better incomes, and stronger financial viability. The reverse case is equally telling: in our work on scenarios for Kenya’s Last Mile Connectivity by 2030, we show that the currently followed grid-centric approach to last-mile electrification is far more expensive than approaches that mix off-grid options. By taking into account urbanisation dynamics along growth corridors, it is possible to find the mix that responds to spatially differentiated needs. Our surveys indeed show past programme preferences for grid extension, and chasing connection targets without a complete picture of end-user connections results in low voltage quality at last-mile connections, which means low consumption in practice. Solving the spatial justice issue of system reliability at the network end points through investment in additional transformers then becomes too expensive. This pushed tariffs up, which pushed demand down further; for example, Kenya reduced its 2030 power output target from 10 GW to 7 GW because demand grew far slower than planned. Such a vicious cycle towards low-demand equilibria is often the story of plans for the last mile. Whether it’s a community mini-grid or a national (last-mile) electrification plan, it must start from a much more complete and spatially explicit understanding of communities’ lives, how they’d use energy, and how everything else around them shapes that dynamic demand. 

"Whether it’s a community mini-grid or a national electrification plan, it must start from a much more complete and spatially explicit understanding of communities’ lives, how they’d use energy, and how everything else around them shapes that dynamic demand. "

My ongoing work follows this through, modelling energy use spatially explicitly under different urbanisation and development pathways. This matters because the shape of future demand determines both the cost of the energy system and the sequencing of investments, and poor sequencing creates expensive lock-ins. In increasingly variable renewable-dominated power systems across Africa, for example, grid-scale storage and grid reinforcement cannot be treated as add-ons: an unreliable grid carries real economy-wide costs, from stalled enterprises to suppressed demand. Co-designing storage and reliability into the system as the grid and supply are built out, just as productive uses were designed into Matembwe from the start, is likely the least-cost path for the economy as a whole. 

You're leading the preparation of AISESA’s values manifesto. Why must we state our values explicitly and how do you hope the manifesto will shape collaboration and engagement in the network? 

AISESA grew partly out of a shared frustration among the founders, myself included, that a lot of research and policy support for African energy planning doesn’t reflect the values that actually drive us: that energy should drive development, that access should be fair and improve livelihoods, and that planning should rest on local ownership and African leadership.  

If an institution sets out to build local capacity, in the widest sense of institutional and human technical capacity, to enable a shift in policy and address long-standing inequities, it can’t leave those commitments implicit. For me, when underlying values are implicit, they quietly get overridden by other default objectives and externally driven priorities. The manifesto is our way of making the shared values driving AISESA explicit and holding ourselves to them. 

That’s what a values manifesto does for a network: it serves as a compass. It shapes who chooses to join, how we work together and with partners, and what we hold each other accountable to. A team of AISESA fellows, with my contributions, is currently iterating a draft manifesto, based mainly on the outputs of the “from Values to a Manifesto” Workshop at the second congress, where the network worked in groups to identify, define, and prioritise overarching values. This draft manifesto will be shared and endorsed at the 3rd congress of AISESA in Kampala in September 2026.