Incentivizing Grid Reliability: A Framework for Performance-Linked Electricity Improvements in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
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2025-10-06
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Reliable electricity is the foundation of modern economies and essential to social and human development. Without it, firms cannot expand, hospitals cannot operate safely, and households hesitate to invest in appliances and tools that improve daily life. It is reliability—not just connection—that unlocks the full promise of access: delivering jobs, growth, and opportunity. Yet across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), ensuring electricity reliability has proven to be one of the most intractable energy systems challenges.
Today, key underlying conditions have shifted, opening an opportunity to directly focus finance and accountability toward improvements in service quality. Technologies like smart meters, feeder sensors, and cloud-based analytics are now affordable and practical to deploy even in weak-grid contexts. Development finance is moving decisively toward results-based mechanisms, and the political economy of the power sector is evolving with new actors—from distribution companies and private utilities to mini-grid and energy service operators—demonstrating accountability models that put performance at the center. What is needed next is a bold new approach that empowers locally led innovation to close the reliability gap.
There is a window to act decisively by realigning incentives with results to unlock meaningful gains in productivity, service delivery, and equitable energy access. This discussion paper is intended to guide and inform the hard conversations and coalition-building needed to seize that window, helping operators, funders, and governments chart a path toward reliable power systems that deliver on the full promise of electrification.
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Phillips, Jonathan, Abdoulaye Cissé, Marc Jeuland, Megan Elizabeth Lang, Jean Nahrae Lee, Ryan McCord, Robyn Meeks, Dalia Patino-Echeverri, et al. (2025). Incentivizing Grid Reliability: A Framework for Performance-Linked Electricity Improvements in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/33432.
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Scholars@Duke
Jonathan Phillips
Jonathan Phillips is the Director of the James E. Rogers Energy Access Project at Duke University, with an appointment at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. His work focuses on policy, regulatory, and economic issues related to rural electrification, grid de-carbonization, off-grid energy systems, and energy for productivity.
Phillips was the senior advisor to the president and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation during the Obama Administration, helping scale-up the agency’s climate finance capabilities and lead the implementation of strategic initiatives, including the agency’s $2.1 billion Power Africa portfolio.
Before that, Phillips led private sector engagement and programming with Power Africa at USAID, helping ramp-up the $300 million presidential initiative into one of the largest public-private development partnerships in the world.
From 2007-2014, he held a variety of roles in the U.S. Congress, most recently serving as the senior policy advisor to Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. He supported many notable legislative efforts, including serving as one of the lead authors of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009. He also served on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming as well as the House Natural Resources Committee.
Phillips was a business and economic development volunteer with the Peace Corps in Mongolia. He received a bachelor’s degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Marc A. Jeuland
Marc Jeuland is a Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, with a joint appointment in the Duke Global Health Institute. His research interests include nonmarket valuation, water and sanitation, environmental health, energy poverty and transitions, trans-boundary water resource planning and management, and the impacts and economics of climate change.
Jeuland's recent research includes work to understand the economic implications of climate change for water resources projects on transboundary river systems, a range of primary data collection projects related to analysis of adoption of environmental health improving technology, and analysis of the costs and benefits of environmental health interventions in developing countries. He has conducted multiple field experiments on issues such as: the role of water quality information in affecting household water and hygiene behaviors; the demand for, and impacts of cleaner cookstoves on household well-being; the long-term sustainability and effects of rural sanitation and water supply projects. He has also collected data on preferences for a range of environmental health improvements including cholera vaccines, household water treatment technologies and improved cookstoves. In the energy and development domain, he is currently working on several projects with the Energy Access Project at Duke, and is a co-founder of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI), along with Professor Subhrendu Pattanayak and scholars from Chile, China and Ethiopia. His energy portfolio includes work related to evaluation of cleaner cooking interventions, measuring energy access and reliability, and reviews of the drivers and impacts literature related to energy.
Jeuland has worked in the past with the World Bank, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, UNICEF, and many field-based NGOs and community-based implementing organizations.
Prior to his graduate studies and work with the World Bank, Jeuland was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where he designed and monitored construction of a pilot wastewater treatment system and trained management personnel at the plant’s managing firm.
Robyn Meeks
Robyn C. Meeks is the Mark and Lynne Florian Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is a research affiliate at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, senior editor of the VoxDevLit on Electricity Infrastructure, and an associate editor at AEJ: Applied.
During the 2023 – 2024 academic year, Prof. Meeks was a Climate Fellow at Harvard Business School’s Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society (BiGS).
Her research is at the intersection of environmental, energy, and development economics with much of her work focusing on understanding individual, household, and firm responses to the introduction of various water and energy technologies, policies, and types of infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries. Much of this work relates to and informs development policies as well as climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. Professor Meeks has implemented research in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and North and South America. On-going research is in Benin, China, Nepal, Pakistan, and the United States.
Professor Meeks has a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a master’s degree from Yale University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
For more information, please see research page and Google Scholar page.
Rafia Zaman
Rafia Zaman is an interdisciplinary researcher who works on off-grid solar electricity access policies. Her analyses consider market development, institutional governance, local politics, and distributional impacts associated with off-grid investments in low-income contexts. She primarily uses quantitative approaches, drawing from methods used in development economics, spatial statistics, and in engineering sciences. At Duke, she conducts experimental and quasi-experimental research on themes related to energy development and inequality, including economic assessment of electricity access and reliability, evaluation of clean cooking promotion policies, the political economy of energy (safety net programs), and development impacts of technology diffusion/adaptation. Rafia holds a PhD (in Sustainability and Innovation Management) from the University of Graz (FWF – DK Climate Change) in Austria and an MBA from the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand.
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