Public finance is crucial to achieving universal energy access. While a range of technological solutions already exist for electrification and clean cooking, public financing remains essential to deploy energy services in areas unaddressed by the market (e.g. planning and building the energy infrastructure). It is further needed to build the ecosystem that supports the sustainability and resilience of energy deployment, ensuring energy access to last-mile, underserved, remote and rural communities; bridging end-users’ affordability gaps, and de-risking and catalysing private capital effectively through policy and regulatory instruments.
To achieve SDG 7, public finance commitments and appropriate instruments need to be scaled up significantly. Public finance needs vary depending on the technology solution (stand-alone systems, mini-grids, clean cooking solutions) and the stakeholders in the ecosystem, including end users and enterprises. This report offers a framework to guide policy makers and public financiers in identifying the public finance needed to advance energy access. It seeks to map the public finance needs across the energy access ecosystem, identify challenges in scaling up public finance for energy access, and identify stakeholder preferences across public finance instruments, intermediaries and recipients.
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