Douglas Barnes and his team of development experts provide an essential guide that can help improve the quality of life to the estimated 1.6 billion rural people in the world who are without electricity. The difficulties in bringing electricity to rural areas are formidable: Low population densities result in high capital and operating costs. Consumers are often poor, and their electricity consumption is low. Politicians interfere with the planning and operations of programs, insisting on favored constituents. Yet, as Barnes and his contributors demonstrate, many countries have overcome these obstacles. The Challenge of Rural Electrification provides lessons from successful programs in Bangladesh, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, and Tunisia, as well as Ireland and the United States. These insights are presented in a format that should be accessible to a broad range of policymakers, development professionals, and community advocates. Barnes and his contributors do not provide a single formula for bringing electricity to rural areas. They do not recommend a specific set of institutional arrangements for the participation of public sector companies, cooperatives, and private firms. They argue instead that successful programs follow a flexible, but still well-defined set of principles: a financially viable plan that clearly accounts for any subsidies; a cooperative relationship between electricity providers and local communities; and an operational separation from day-to-day government and politics.

1. The Challenge of Rural Electrification2. The Cooperative Experience in Costa Rica3. Power and Politics in the Philippines4. Rural Poverty and Electricity Challenges in Bangladesh5. Public Distribution and Electricity Problem Solving in Rural Thailand6. From Central Planning to Decentralized Electricity Distribution in Mexico7. Electricity and Multisector Development in Rural Tunisia8. Rural Electricity Subsidies and the Private Sector in Chile9. National Support for Decentralized Electricity Growth in Rural China10. The New Deal for Electricity in the United States: 1930-195011. Electricity For Social Development in Ireland12. Meeting the Challenge of Rural Electrification