Methodology & FAQs

We must connect as many people as we can by 2030. But initial connections alone can’t be the end goal. People need enough power to make a meaningful difference in their lives and livelihoods.

Fortunately, the World Bank already has the solution in its Multi-Tier Framework (MTF). The MTF defines tiers of both household electricity supply and consumption, moving us beyond binary access metrics. The debate over which tier to count as “access” doesn’t need to be complicated: we can track every tier.

This removes tension between setting the bar too low (to lift people out of poverty) versus too high (to reach 300 million by 2030). When we track all tiers, we can highlight progress at all levels. This is more accurate for how energy progress happens, and more useful for governments, utilities, donors, and citizens.    

Tier 4 or above means using at least 250 kWh of electricity per person a year at home, the household component of the Energy for Growth Hub’s Modern Energy Minimum. It is enough to run a refrigerator alongside lighting, fans, a television, and other everyday appliances, which is why we use it as a benchmark for meaningful household consumption.

Tier 1 begins at just 0.9 kWh per person a year. The difference between that level and no electricity use at all is too small to distinguish reliably with satellite and other remote sensing data. We therefore report Tiers 0 and 1 as a single group: people who use less than 14.6 kWh per person a year, the threshold for Tier 2.

Because utilities and national agencies don’t collect and publish consumption data at the scale and level of detail needed, we lack a credible way to measure and track household consumption. Until now.

Open Energy Maps (OEMaps) fills this gap by estimating electricity access and use for every building from satellite and other remote sensing data, then matching the results to national statistics (see “How are the estimates made?”).

Machine learning models, trained on utility meter and billing data, estimate each building’s likelihood of a grid connection and its electricity use. They work from satellite and other geospatial data: building footprints and heights, land cover, nighttime lights, and internet speeds. We then anchor these estimates to each country’s population, World Bank access rate, and reported household electricity use. Finally, a simple transformation adjusts how consumption is spread across people. It is learned from utility billing records in 21 countries and household surveys, and its effect depends on each country’s average household electricity use per person, so the method better generalizes to the countries we cover.

We compare our results with 31 household surveys in 22 countries, none of which were used to fit our consumption distributions. On average, about 92% of people fall in the same tier in our estimates as in the surveys, or, framed another way, our estimates and the surveys disagree on the tier of about 1 in 12 people.

Every source of information on household electricity use is imperfect. Surveys depend on self-reported bills and small sample sizes, while utility records miss losses, unmetered customers, and shared connections. National statistics are often estimated or later revised, and solar home systems and diesel generators may not appear in official data. Our models also learn from detailed data in only a few countries. By combining many sources, we let their errors partly offset, and we flag countries where the inputs are weaker.

MTF surveys rate households mainly on the electricity supply available to them, such as capacity, hours, and reliability. We estimate how much electricity people actually use, which can differ substantially from what is available to them. We compare the two in “How are the estimates validated?”

We cover 84 low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, with estimates for every year from 2019 to 2025. Countries in red on the map are not yet covered, usually because their building or input data are still incomplete. Cold-climate countries, shown in gray, are excluded: their household electricity use, shaped largely by heating, differs substantially from that of the warmer countries our models are built for and trained on.

Countries shown in orange on the map carry a caution flag for one of two reasons. Either our coverage checks fail, for example because mapped buildings cover only part of the population, or the national electricity total is less certain: it is modeled, it excludes part of the country, or it differs substantially from the figures reported by the country’s utilities. Each country page explains the reason.

Our estimates follow each country’s reported household electricity use. When that total stalls or falls while the population grows, there is less electricity to go around, so fewer people reach the higher tiers, even as more people gain a connection. This happens in a few countries, often for real reasons such as conflict, drought-driven power cuts, or a failing utility.

Yes. We first split each country’s World Bank access rate into grid and off-grid shares, using household surveys and IRENA statistics. Grid-connected users, including most users of grid-quality mini-grids, are modeled building by building and matched to national household electricity use. Our building-level model is trained on grid data, so users of solar home systems, solar lanterns, and other off-grid systems fall outside it. Instead, we place them in tiers using World Bank MTF survey data on the capacity of their systems. Where a country has no such survey, we use regional or cross-country medians.

Each country’s estimates are matched to its reported household electricity use, drawn from the IEA World Energy Balances or, where IEA data are missing, from United Nations or African Energy Commission statistics. Where the country’s utilities publish their own figures and those disagree with the statistics, we use the utilities’ figures instead and cite them on the country page. For years without a published statistic, mainly 2025, a simple growth model projects the total.

Partly. Our 2025 building-level estimates draw on 2025 satellite and other remote sensing data, so they reflect where electricity is used today and how it is spread across buildings. We then scale these estimates to each country’s official household electricity total. Those totals typically lag by a year or more, so we project most countries’ 2025 figures from recent trends. This projection affects overall consumption levels and, in turn, the tier shares. We will replace the projections with published figures as they become available.

Open Energy Tracking covers every year from 2019 to 2025. Most satellite and remote sensing inputs are updated annually, so new years can be added routinely. This ease of updating is a major advantage compared to traditional data collection.

Planned improvements include:

• Expanded coverage and data quality: adding low- and middle-income countries not yet covered and addressing the data gaps behind current caution flags.
• Apartment buildings: an explicit treatment for large multi-unit buildings.
• Additional validation data: adding new household surveys and utility billing releases as they become available.

You can download the full dataset, covering every country and year, from the “Download All Country Data” button on our home page. Each country’s tier shares are also shown on its country page. Please cite the data as:

Lee, S.J.; Taneja, J. (2026). Open Energy Tracking: Tracking Residential Electricity Consumption Tiers at the National Level. Methodology note, Energy for Growth Hub. https://openenergytracking.org

The Open Energy Tracking platform estimates for 84 low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean are available as a public service, supported by the Energy for Growth Hub. The data is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). You may share and adapt the data for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit.

Download the full dataset (CSV).

Yes. We welcome partnerships that strengthen the data behind Open Energy Tracking. We are especially interested in utility records, household electricity surveys, and off-grid consumption data from solar home systems, mini-grids, and other providers. These sources help us validate and improve our estimates and extend coverage to more countries. We also welcome governments, regulators, and development partners who want to use the estimates for planning or monitoring. To discuss a potential collaboration, please contact info@energyforgrowth.org.