We work to improve Infrastructure Services

Well-performing utilities are the foundation of any credible strategy for expanding access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable electricity. Yet across Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than half the population still lacks access to electricity and supply struggles to keep pace with demand, the data needed to understand how utilities are actually performing, and to drive the reforms needed to improve performance, has historically been scarce, inconsistent, and difficult to compare across countries. Good policy and meaningful reform require good data. Recognizing this, the World Bank hired DHInfrastructure to develop a systematic framework for measuring and tracking the performance of power utilities across the region.

Sierra Leone's Electricity and Water Regulatory Commission (EWRC) needed to transform from a nascent institution into an effective, independent regulator capable of overseeing the country's electricity and water sectors. Without a comprehensive regulatory framework, clear tariff methodologies, or established procedures for utility oversight, the regulator lacked the tools and capacity to fulfill its mandate. The stakes were high: strengthening EWRC was essential not only for sector reform but also for Sierra Leone's eligibility for future development assistance from MCC.

Georgia’s effort to update its long-term power supply strategy through 2047 raised complex questions about how the country should balance energy security, hydropower expansion, environmental protection, and community impacts. Policymakers were evaluating multiple development pathways—including large reservoir hydropower, expanded wind and solar generation, restrictions on development in sensitive river basins, and greater reliance on imports—each with distinct technical, environmental, and social tradeoffs. Georgia’s electricity system operator (GSE) and the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development needed a planning process that integrated power system modeling with rigorous environmental and social analysis. The World Bank hired DHInfrastructure to lead that effort.

The Climate Investment Funds (CIF) is a multilateral climate finance mechanism that helps developing countries accelerate clean energy investment through grants, concessional financing, and partnerships with multilateral development banks. To access CIF support, governments must prepare comprehensive investment plans that identify priority investments, align with national energy and development objectives, and satisfy rigorous technical, financial, and institutional requirements. For many countries, developing these plans presents a significant challenge, requiring coordination across government agencies, utilities, development partners, and private stakeholders while balancing policy priorities, infrastructure needs, and financing constraints.

In 2017, the Government of Uzbekistan launched an ambitious program of economic reforms aimed at transitioning the country to a market-oriented economy. The energy sector was a central focus: decades of Soviet-era vertical integration had left Uzbekistan with a power sector characterized by institutional fragmentation, weak governance, limited private sector participation, and tariffs that fell short of cost recovery. The Government asked the World Bank to lead energy sector institutional and sector restructuring as one of two key areas of reform, and the World Bank hired DHInfrastructure to provide the analytical foundation for that agenda.

Attracting private investment in clean energy requires more than good intentions—it requires the right policy and regulatory environment. But until recently, there was no globally comparable way to measure whether countries were actually putting that environment in place. Policymakers had no reliable tool for benchmarking their frameworks against regional and global peers; investors had no systematic basis for assessing the policy risks of deploying capital in unfamiliar markets; and researchers had no consistent data for tracking whether reforms were translating into results. The World Bank wanted to fill that gap by developing a set of global indicators—the Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy (RISE)—that would benchmark country-level progress across the four pillars of sustainable energy: access to electricity, access to clean cooking, energy efficiency, and renewable energy.

Development finance institutions invest heavily in advisory programs designed to improve policy frameworks, strengthen regulatory environments, and catalyze private investment, but demonstrating that those programs are actually working is genuinely difficult. The challenge is not measuring direct outputs, which are relatively straightforward to count, but attributing market-level change to a specific advisory intervention in a context where many factors are at play simultaneously. When the International Finance Corporation (IFC) wanted to capture the indirect private investment impacts of its Renewable Energy and Power Advisory Programs, it faced exactly this problem: operations teams had strong intuitions about the market development their work was enabling, but no rigorous, consistent methodology for documenting and attributing those impacts. IFC hired DHInfrastructure to develop one.

California faces a substantial transmission buildout to meet its clean energy mandate, and the cost of financing that infrastructure has direct implications for ratepayers. NetZero California and the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) wanted to understand whether publicly financed transmission lines could reduce financing costs and relieve downward pressure on end-user tariffs—and, if so, what institutional and financing structures would best achieve that goal. DHInfrastructure was engaged to evaluate the alternatives to traditional investor-owned utility approaches, focusing on public financing models and public-private partnerships.

An international arbitration arose between a toll road concessionaire and a municipal government concerning the interpretation of the concession contract’s tariff adjustment mechanism and the investor’s resulting damages claim. The dispute centered on whether the toll adjustment provisions had been applied correctly and whether the investor had in fact suffered the revenue losses it alleged. DHInfrastructure was retained to provide independent economic and financial analysis and expert support in the proceedings.