The Ethiopian Electric Utility (EEU) is installing 500,000 smart prepaid electricity meters nationwide at a total cost of $48.8 million, a rollout designed to eliminate the prepaid card system that has long frustrated customers with lost cards, network failures, and trips to overcrowded service centers.
The deployment includes 125,000 smart three-phase meters, 25,000 smart single-phase meters, and 350,000 offline single-phase modern prepaid meters, according to Anwar Abrar, Communications Executive Director at the EEU, speaking to Fana Media Corporation.
Installation is already underway. Some 60,457 single-phase meters have been installed for residential and commercial customers consuming up to 7.5 kW, while 7,013 three-phase meters are currently being fitted for users drawing between 8 and 24 kW — a category that includes larger residences, commercial establishments, and small-scale industrial operations.
The core change for customers is practical: the new meters allow prepaid electricity purchases via mobile phone, removing the need to physically visit EEU service centers or rely on scratch-card-style prepaid tokens. More than 67,000 customers are already purchasing electricity from home through mobile applications provided by the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), Ethio Telecom, and Awash Bank, Abrar said.
The new meters are intended to address the recurring problems of lost and damaged prepaid cards, network outages at point-of-sale terminals, and the broader payment difficulties that have burdened customers under the existing system,
Abrar told Fana.
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The mobile integration reflects the expanding role of Ethiopia's digital payments infrastructure in public services. CBE's mobile banking platform, Ethio Telecom's telebirr, and Awash Bank's digital channels now serve as recharging points — a shift that routes electricity payments through the same ecosystem increasingly used for remittances, merchant payments, and government services.
The rollout addresses one of the weakest links in Ethiopia's power sector: distribution and revenue collection. While the country's generation capacity has expanded significantly — driven by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and other hydropower projects — the utility has struggled with billing inefficiencies, power theft, and customer service bottlenecks that undercut its ability to convert generated power into collected revenue. Smart meters, which record consumption data digitally and can be monitored remotely, are a standard tool utilities worldwide use to reduce non-technical losses and improve cash flow.
At 500,000 units, the program represents a meaningful but partial upgrade. Ethiopia has an estimated 5 to 6 million electricity customers, meaning the current phase would cover roughly 8–10% of the customer base. The $48.8 million price tag — denominated in dollars, reflecting the imported hardware involved — is notable in the context of Ethiopia's tight foreign exchange environment, though the EEU has not disclosed the funding source.
The project sits within a broader infrastructure modernization push that includes telecom liberalization, digital payments expansion, and ongoing energy sector investment. For the average EEU customer, the immediate promise is simpler: buy electricity from a phone, skip the line, and stop worrying about a lost plastic card.
