When Mediatrice Uwimana finishes her day’s work on the farm in rural Rwanda, she no longer retreats into the dark.
Solar panels on her roof now power her home long after sunset, and the evenings no longer end when the daylight does.
“Solar light allowed me to do things on time, charge my phone at home, communicate with others, and help my children study after dark,” Uwimana said.
Across Rwanda, millions of households like Uwimana’s have crossed an invisible threshold. They have moved from energy poverty into a world where a charged phone can connect a farmer to markets, a lit room can extend a workday, and a reliable energy source can seed a small business, creating jobs and opportunity.
Rwanda’s electricity access rate has climbed from just 6 percent in 2009 to an estimated 85 percent in 2025, one of the most rapid expansions on the continent in a generation.
That achievement is central to a much larger ambition. Mission 300, a joint initiative between the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank Group, aims to bring electricity to 300 million people across Africa by 2030.
Rwanda’s experience offers a working blueprint for how to do it: reduce cost barriers, track who benefits, and ensure the energy transition creates jobs at every level of the supply chain.
Removing the Barrier That Mattered Most
For years, the obstacle to electrification for low-income and female-headed households in Rwanda was not technology or policy intent, it was money.
In 2022, only 56.1 percent of female-headed households had electricity, compared with 66.7 percent of male-headed households. Among women without power, more than six in ten identified the upfront connection cost as the primary barrier. Traditional financing alone was not enough to close the gap.
The Renewable Energy Fund (REF), a partnership between the Government of Rwanda and the World Bank Group, had initially relied on lending to expand access. Implemented by the Development Bank of Rwanda (BRD) and financed under the Climate Investment Funds’ Scaling-Up Renewable Energy Program, it reached only 3,180 new users in its first three years, with women consistently underrepresented among them.
That experience prompted a change in approach.
In October 2020, the REF launched Window 5, a results-based financing facility that offered partial grants to reduce the price of off-grid solar systems for households.
Critically, it eliminated the conventional gatekeeping mechanisms: no collateral, no formal credit history, no requirement to belong to a savings cooperative. The subsidy scaled progressively, providing the greatest support to the households facing the steepest affordability gaps.
The results were unambiguous. By the project’s closure in December 2024, the REF had reached more than 2 million beneficiaries, 52 percent of them women.
