Open Data Powered App “Utility Performance and Behavior in Africa Today (UPBEAT) ” by the World Bank Energy Practice and Derilinx

Derilinx worked with the World Bank Energy Practice to deliver UPBEAT, a framework for sharing and comparing experiences between electric utilities in Sub-Saharan Africa. It facilitates an understanding of how utilities perform today and tracks the changes in their performance over time.

The user requirements meant complex calculations had to be performed over multiple subsets of the over 80 indicators to generate various summary values whilst maintaining application responsiveness.

The information in UPBEAT app is structured in five pages with different dimensions and indicators:

• Financial Performance
• Operational Performance
• Transparency and Accountability
• Utility Dashboard
• Utility Specific All Performance Indicators

This app is the fruit of a close partnership between the World Bank Energy Practice team and Derilinx. It represents once again the transition from the “data published” stage to “data linked and visualised” stage to create sustainable impact aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals.

How UPBEAT tool looks like (click images to enlarge).

Check out the App

The UPBEAT data platform presents basic analysis of validated information on the performance of electric utilities in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a total of over 80 performance indicators in the categories of Financial (Fin), Operational (Op), and Transparency and Accountability (T&A).

The objective of UPBEAT is to facilitate understanding of utilities’ performance at a certain point in time, track the changes in utilities’ performance over time as well as benchmark utilities’ performance against their peers in the region.

The Fin and Op graphs allow the UPBEAT user to group utilities into cohorts based on the “Utility Type” – segments of the value chain covered by a utility’s operations—vertically integrated utilities (VIUs), generation-only utilities, transmission-only utilities, distribution-only utilities, etc. It also gives the user the option to group utilities by membership of each of Sub-Saharan Africa’s four power pools—Central Africa Power Pool (CAPP), Eastern Africa Power Pool (EAPP), Southern African Power Pool (SAPP), and West African Power Pool (WAPP), or those utilities that are not a member of any power pool. The user can, alternatively, select their own group of utilities for comparison.

For the “Utility Type” or “Power Pool” groups, a median value is calculated for each of the Fin and Op indicators, and a mean value for the T&A values. This can be displayed alongside the individual utility’s values for comparison purposes.

The Transparency and Accountability graph displays the utility’s compliance with a set of criteria, such as whether shares are publicly listed, as a percentage. A list of the criteria met by each utility can be accessed by hovering over the data point.

The Utility Dashboard displays a selection of Fin, Op and T&A indicator graphs and tables, the contents of which are dependent on the utility type. This is designed to give a comprehensive overview of the current status of a utility, and is intended for printing.

All information on a single utility is displayed on the Utility Specific All Performance Indicators sheet. This information is also available as a download from the Fin, Op and T&A pages.

A comprehensive help facility, with information on calculations etc. is provided on the About page.