Design of a Real-Time Power Outage Reporting App for Customers of Enugu Electricity Distribution Company

Unreliable electricity supply is one of the most pervasive infrastructure challenges in Nigeria, with distribution companies like the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) lacking efficient systems for customer outage reporting and incident resolution tracking. This study designs a real-time power outage reporting application for EEDC customers across Enugu, Abia, Imo, and Ebonyi States in the South East. The application is built using React Native and a Firebase Realtime Database, enabling instant outage reports from customers with automatic geolocation tagging. The Scrum methodology frames development across four sprints, with participation from 50 EEDC customers and 8 field engineers. Features include one-tap outage reporting, fault status updates, estimated restoration times, historical outage logs, and a field engineer dispatch dashboard. Testing assessed report-to-resolution cycle time, GPS accuracy, and app crash rates over a six-week evaluation period. Results show that fault categorisation time at EEDC's control centre decreased by 48 percent, and customer satisfaction with outage communication improved significantly per post-survey analysis. The study acknowledges that internet access constraints during outages, since networks often fail simultaneously, limit immediate reporting and recommends SMS-based fallback reporting. This research offers a consumer-engagement model applicable to other Nigerian electricity distribution companies. Keywords: power outage reporting, EEDC, real-time, React Native, electricity distribution