Beyond customer acquisition: A comprehensive review of community participation in mini grid projects

Abstract Mini grids are increasingly recognized as a solution for the 840 million people globally without access to electricity and for the additional millions of people poorly served by traditional grid infrastructure. Understanding the role and importance of community participation in mini grid inception, design, build, and operations and maintenance will be essential to sustainably achieving universal access. This review analyzes the literature on community participation in private mini grid projects: how community participation is defined, in which phases of the project it arises, and how it affects the project's sustainability. We find that community participation is almost universally invoked as essential to system sustainability. Community participation most often appears in the operations and maintenance phase, leading to a positive social sustainability. We compile best practices, such as initiating participation early, pursuing wide inclusion, investing in community technical capacity, and creating clear governance models. Finally, we provide a framework and accompanying survey tool to gather information on community participation in mini grid systems to attenuate literature gaps. Community participation in mini grid projects should be leveraged to accelerate universal electricity access and green economic recovery, but it must go beyond surface level customer acquisition.