Friday, January 15, 2010

Rural Electrification and Low Connection Costs


Village in Maharashtra India: by D. Barnes
Many developing countries still have very high connection costs.  This helps with the utility to recover costs of providing serive, but it also means that many people even in areas with electricity available may not be able to afford a connection to the electricity grid.  Reasearch from around the world indicates that those countries wth low new service connection costs or which provide financal assistance for such costs have much higher rates of connection by poorer households. 

Given that the benefits of rural electrification are quite high, should countries or utilities with high connection costs consider changing their policies?

For more information see short note on
Transformative Power.

There will be more to come on this topic in the future as we are just collecting collecting cost information from a large number of countries.  See new post added in 2013.





1 comment:

Douglas F. Barnes..... said...
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