Leapfrogging the Grid Off-grid Solar, Self-reliance and the Market in Tanzania

Around a third of Tanzanians light their homes with solar electricity. Foreign com-panies are building on the popularity and availability of solar to ???leapfrog??? the classic state -led mains electricity grid infrastructure by attempting to create new off-grid infrastructural pathways. Central to such ambitions is the fostering of individual ownership of these off-grid infrastructures that builds on the idea of self-reliant energy long known to Tanzanians. Yet, such individual ownership, enacted through the hire-purchase device, is precarious, leading to an infrastructure that not only grows but contracts. As it does so, off-grid infrastructures illuminate the dependencies and tensions, including temporal ones, of other techno-social grids. These grids include both emerging digital financial infrastructures and other forms of kinship-based social organisation and property relations.