Countries around the world are undergoing a paradigm shift in energy supply from centralised, fossil-fuelled supply systems to a decentralised, intelligently networked and climate-friendly form of energy supply. Countries in the Global South are playing a key role in this development. There, innovative, decentralised supply systems are already being used intensively in order to connect more people to a reliable and modern system of power supply. Using Mozambique as an example, this study shows how a smartly networked energy supply system grows from the bottom up. It focuses particularly on possible supply strategies and technologies as well as on the political and economic drivers of and barriers to smart power supply. This is the basis for strategies designed to achieve important global development goalsespecially in the areas of energy, the climate, health and poverty reduction.