Electricity access

As of September 2021, the cumulative connectivity rate is 66.8% of Rwandan households including 48.4% connected to the national grid and 18.4% accessing through off-grid systems (mainly solar).

During the elaboration of the EDPRS II, the Government of Rwanda took a clear policy decision to diversify the sources of electricity from traditional dominant grid to include even off-grid connections. Subsequently, Households far away from the planned national grid coverage have been encouraged to use alternatively cheaper connections such as Mini-grids and Solar Photovoltaics (PVs) to reduce the cost of access to electricity whilst relieving constraints on historical government subsidies.

The current access targets stipulate a 100% households access to electricity by the year 2024 while productive users will be all connected before the end of the year 2022. To achieve this target, REG intends to increase the number of new connections by 500,000 every year, including 200,000 on-grid and 300,000 off-grid.