Schools and clinics in poor countries can now buy electricity as a service instead of owning broken solar panels

The World Bank is shifting how off-grid schools and health centers get power. Instead of buying solar equipment outright and hoping someone maintains it, governments will now contract with private companies to provide electricity as a service under long-term agreements — the company owns the equipment, fixes it when it breaks, and gets paid only if power actually flows.

For two decades, off-grid solar projects in Africa and Asia failed at scale because nobody maintained them. A clinic gets panels installed, they degrade, no one fixes them, the clinic goes dark. The World Bank's Lighting Africa program proved the technology works, but the real problem was always the maintenance gap — who pays for repairs five years later when the NGO has moved on? This contract model flips the incentive: the private operator only makes money if the system keeps running, so maintenance becomes their problem, not the government's. The World Bank has already enabled 40 million new connections using this approach as of early 2026, and they're now formalizing it as the standard model across 30 African countries.