World Bank Group Support to Electricity Access, FY2000-2014 : An Independent Evaluation
The World Bank Group has committed to achieving universal access to electricity by 2030 under the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) initiative. This is a daunting challenge: more than 1 billion people do not have access, and another 1 billion hav...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/10/25161357/world-bank-group-support-electricity-access-fy2000-14-independent-evaluation-main-report http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22953 |
| Summary: | The World Bank Group has committed to
achieving universal access to electricity by 2030 under the
Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) initiative. This is a
daunting challenge: more than 1 billion people do not have
access, and another 1 billion have chronically inadequate or
unreliable service. Most of those without access are poor,
and the largest share is in Sub-Saharan Africa. Achieving
universal access within 15 years for the low-access
countries (those with under 50 percent coverage) requires a
quantum leap from their present pace of 1.6 million
connections per year to 14.6 million per year until 2030.
The investment needed would be about $37 billion per year,
including erasing generation deficits and meeting demand
from economic growth. By comparison, in recent years,
low-access countries received an average of $3.6 billion per
year for their electricity sectors from public and private
sources, including $1.5 billion per year from the World Bank
Group. Development outcomes of the Bank Group’s assistance
were generally favorable compared with other infrastructure
sectors. However, performance in improving financial
viability of country electricity sectors was below
expectations. There were significant gaps in the Bank
Group’s coverage of low-access countries, mostly in
Sub-Saharan Africa. Median implementation time of World Bank
investment projects was nine years, with time overruns
attributable to inadequate project design and borrower
capacity. Support for off-grid electrification was low and
sporadic, with a few notable exceptions. The Bank Group’s
growing non-conventional renewable energy portfolio is
dealing with technology and regulatory challenges. Tracking
welfare and gender impacts in World Bank projects has
improved, and International Finance Corporation (IFC) has
made a beginning in addressing these issues. The Bank made
some significant pilot contributions to addressing the
affordability of electricity connections. Collaboration grew
among World Bank, IFC, and MIGA through joint projects,
which helps break ground for the private sector in some
high-risk and fragile countries, and supports a few large
and complex projects. The scale of the SE4All challenge
requires the Bank Group to reposition itself as a global
solutions provider in the sector, going well beyond the
confines of its own direct support for access. This
evaluation points to the urgency for the Bank Group‘s energy
practice to adopt a new and transformative strategy to help
country clients orchestrate a national, sustained
sector-level engagement for universal access. A major
challenge in this effort is to deploy the Bank Group units’
individual and collective strengths beyond Bank Group–led
projects and transactions to stimulate private sector
investments for closing the financing gap, especially in
generation, for low-access countries. |
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