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I’m bemused that so many of these conversations seem to be falling into myopic, defensive huddles that do not grapple honestly with why the constituency for development turned out to be vaporware. Congressional support – supposedly buttressed by a bedrock civil society coalition that included business and churches – never rallied and, maybe, was so shallow that it barely existed.

One strategy to rebuild that seems to be gaining traction in some circles is a push for “more rigorous evidence.” In particular, I’m hearing calls to fund far more experimental evaluation of interventions, especially randomized controlled trials or RCTs. I suppose the notion is “if we show skeptics that aid actually works, then they’ll spend political capital defending it.” This strikes me as politically tone-deaf and likely damaging.

If you’re not a dev nerd, RCTs randomly divide people into groups, give one the treatment and not the other, and measure the difference. Because the split is random, whatever gap shows up later must be the treatment’s effect. The method works to test & prove pharmaceuticals. That’s because a drug trial is a clean setup: one well-defined treatment, a short causal chain, and an effect that’s easy to isolate. It’s enticing to hope we can use the same approach to test & prove development ideas. The thinking goes: Let’s identify roughly similar groups, randomly assign a treatment [give cash, a laptop, cheap fertilizer, a solar lantern, etc] to one and not the other, and then compare the two groups later to measure the isolated effect. Voilà, we can prove impact. And, advocates hope, policymakers and politicians can use all this evidence to justify development aid – because they’ll be spending money on what works and not on stuff that doesn’t.

RCTs for development are all the rage. The researchers who pioneered the idea earned a Nobel Prize in 2019, penned a best selling book, and launched multiple well-funded research organizations to deploy armies of grad students to run experiments. This approach has pretty much overtaken the entire field of development economics. It’s nearly a cult.

The RCT wave did help focus the aid industry on impact and cost-effectiveness. It’s been useful for some social sector programs, especially health and safety nets, and for designing more efficient humanitarian relief. I used RCT evidence on cash transfers to make the case for citizen dividends in new oil economies in my book, Oil to Cash. Some of my favorite people are diehard Randomistas.

But RCTs’ dominance has also created some very weird – and I’d say ultimately detrimental – effects on researchers’ ability to influence government policies that might, you know, promote economic development.

RCTs are useful for discovering some things…

Here’s an exhaustive list of what RCTs are good for:

1. Evaluating the specific effect of a designed experiment, provided that treatment can be randomized among willing participants and cleanly isolated from external factors

2. Academic publications

3. Tenure

…but RCTs are not actually useful for much of anything that most politicians care about

Here’s my non-exhaustive list of what RCTs cannot help us understand because they are not randomizable or easily isolated:

1. How to make poor countries rich

2. How to spur economic growth

3. How to foster industrialization and economic transformation

4. How to add value to critical mineral supply chains

5. How to use AI and demand for data center infrastructure to promote economic opportunities

6. How to build political coalitions for policies that have a fighting chance to overcome low-equilibrium rent seeking that is strangling many low-income economies

In other words, the dominant tool in development economics is not useful for macroeconomic questions, political economy puzzles, or any of today’s economic policy priorities in most developing countries. A minister of health or education might want to know how to squeeze 10% efficiency gains out of their budget by weighing different options. That’s useful, on the margins.

But the finance minister, the infrastructure minister, the industrial policy cabinet lead, and indeed the president all hold much higher ambitions. They are, in nearly every emerging market country I know, hoping to turn their economies into wealthy, high-productivity engines that create full employment and compete in the global economy. RCTs can’t help them do that.

The multiple damaging effects of the randomization revolution

If this was just one academic subdiscipline driving itself into irrelevance, it wouldn’t matter much. But the total dominance of RCTs is creating damage to the range of policy questions research can help us answer. Others far smarter than me have slammed RCTs and their overhyped misuse, most famously Angus Deaton and Lant Pritchett. My criticisms could be summarized in three ways:

• Confuses what’s measurable with what’s important. The Dismal Science was once about big ideas facing humanity: How do we make the world richer? How do societies become productive? How do we free people to make choices in their own lives? RCTs have skewed problem identification from what matters to what’s easily experimental. Development economics has gone from dreaming about humanity’s future to getting lost down rabbit holes about measurement and methodology. The arguments are now more about statistics than ideas. The Worm Wars, for example, is a debate over one seminal study from 2003 that helped initiate the whole RCT push by finding a cost effective way to get poor kids in western Kenya to attend school by giving them deworming pills. After 23+ years, the war is still raging. This is a very long way from the big questions that created development economics – or what’s top of mind for today’s policymakers.

• Presupposes what counts as evidence. While most economists agree that other kinds of non-RCT evidence are perfectly valid, it’s also very common to hear RCTs described as “the gold standard.” In other words, other approaches are less valuable. I hear this often, like when people try to dismiss our Empty Quadrant scatterplot as irrelevant since it’s not directly causal. We know. But it’s still useful evidence about a complex relationship.

• Creates powerful incentives for thinking small. Both problems above combine to push the field into ever more micro interventions that are easily measurable rather than the hard-to-isolate macro stuff that determines which countries become prosperous. Are we trying to make poor people a little less miserable? Or finding ways that human progress can benefit everyone, everywhere? RCTs have literally nothing to say about long-run growth.

RCTs are also undermining the push for universal energy abundance

I see these negative dynamics play out in my own work on electricity. I even hear people complain that we lack evidence to show electricity is even needed for development. The article often cited lately is Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development? by my friend Catherine Wolfram along with Ken Lee and Ted Miguel. They’re all great economists and I have nothing but respect for their work. Yet this study, with its bold headline question, answers clearly: no. That’s because they found, based on their own randomized experiments, that very poor households in western Kenya who connected to the grid didn’t use much electricity or show much benefit after 2 to 3 years.

This is no surprise. Connecting extremely poor people who can’t afford to pay for power (much less buy the machines that make electricity useful) doesn’t have a transformational short term impact. Poor people are poor precisely because they are stuck in low-productivity jobs and in markets that are not functioning. So, no, connecting their homes to a wire (that often does not deliver power) will not magically change their lives. I know Catherine et al are thoughtful and more nuanced than this. But I’ve personally experienced people interpreting their work as “RCTs show little effect of an electricity connection, so it’s not worth bothering.”

My interpretation is very different: their paper shows the limitations of RCTs to answer the most pertinent energy question. Why did they opt to randomize electricity for people at home rather than where they actually earn a living, which would be at work on a farm or in a workshop? It’s the bias of the tool: they’re looking for impact where an RCT can spot it, not where we’d expect it. Another academic friend compared RCTs to the old streetlight joke, where a man who lost his keys in the dark only searches under the lamp post because that’s where the light is better.

This is why, for me, Wolfram et al makes a good case that if you want energy to lead to better economic outcomes, don’t prioritize connecting the poorest households. Instead, focus on delivering cheaper and more reliable power for businesses in towns and cities. And let’s just accept that it’s impossible to randomize power for industry. No business would ever knowingly volunteer to suffer blackouts to help an academic study. That means we need a different way to gather evidence. If we stick with randomized experiments in energy it will inevitably push studies down to the micro level of initial access for the extreme poor – and thus back into irrelevance for policymakers focused on growth.

An alternative interpretation, of course, is that the Government of Kenya is pursuing rural electrification for a political or social reason, rather than as a strictly economic one. Most countries do this. (The United States is still subsidizing rural electricity today.) Governments rationally choose to connect everyone, not because they expect an immediate economic payoff, but because they are trying to build more inclusive societies – and politicians are trying to win elections.

We need durable coalitions built on an honest reckoning, not more academic studies

The methodological problem and the political one are really two sides of the same coin: RCTs are not built for the questions that actually move ministers -- or members of the US Congress. Which brings me back to the misguided rationale in some circles that more rigorous randomized studies can save smart development policy in Washington DC and help us rebuild something akin to USAID again. I don’t buy it.

I have seen nothing to suggest that what allowed USAID to be burned to the ground is a lack of peer-reviewed evidence. Does anyone believe that Republicans on Capitol Hill would have defended USAID from DOGE if they had 100 (or even 1000) more academic studies showing the positive impact of aid spending? Of course not. So the way to rebuild a durable political constituency for US development policy is not to double down on randomized experiments.

We need evidence, but not that kind. I would start with old school qualitative research that is way out of fashion. We should be asking all of the old congressional champions what happened, what went wrong, and how did the political incentives shift. Only by understanding the motivations and actual priorities of legislators, senior executive branch officials, and the multitude of external forces that influence them, will we ever come to a new, better understanding of how to rebuild. One good oral history would be far more valuable than a mountain of new impact studies.

If you want US development policy to come roaring back, don’t waste money on another RCT. Spend time interviewing Lindsey Graham.

I don’t love it when people copy an idea and claim it as their own. A popular scatterplot of income and electricity use that we’ve used at the Hub for years has been copied often, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not. Consulting megafirms McKinsey and BCG have each copied a version of our scatterplot within the last year. (FWIW, McKinsey replied with what appears to be bot-generated denials, while BCG apologized and quickly fixed the missing reference. Interpret the varying responses as you will).

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Let’s call it The Empty Quadrant.

One way to keep a graphic fresh is to update the data and give it a compelling name that conveys the purpose. So, please meet the latest version of what we’re now calling The Empty Quadrant.

Or here’s a handy interactive version to dig into the data yourself.

New graphic, evergreen takeaway→ poor countries cannot get rich without lots more electricity.

Some development romantics and climate hawks still hold out hope that energy efficiency will be enough for poor countries. Make lightbulbs and machines productive enough and people just won’t need so many kilowatt-hours. Matt Yglesias has a good recent post about the limits of efficiency for domestic energy.

For global energy, The Empty Quadrant says a clear no. No matter how many lumens we can squeeze out of each kWh, countries that aspire to move into middle-income and then high-income status need many multiples more energy than they use today.

No exceptions. The Empty Quadrant is empty.

Countries barely diverge from the global trendline. Yes, sure, Costa Rica and Romania sneak into the World Bank’s high-income class with kWh/capita below 3,000. But every single country on earth with average income above $30,000 uses at least 4,000 kWh per person. Unless a government deliberately wants their country to stay poor, they need to aim for at least this level of electricity use. Probably much more.

You can help spread the message of The Empty Quadrant

1. Share it. Please just reference the original source :)

2. Debate it. Please just don’t complain about logged axes (it’s intentional for visual clarity) or insist that correlation is not causality (yep, we know).

3. Use it for good. The big message is that we need to massively boost the energy available to people in poor countries. My entire organization is dedicated to how we can do it.

The Scale is Scary.

Rich countries don’t just use double or triple the electricity of poor countries. On average, they use 67 times as much. The United States and Nigeria will soon have about the same population size, yet the average American uses 84x as much electricity as the average Nigerian. For Sierra Leone, the ratio is over 500x. Small solutions aren’t going to cut it.

So, please enjoy The Empty Quadrant. Forward it. Paste it. Slam it. Adapt it. Make it better. But please don’t steal it. And, most of all, don’t ignore what it tells us about humanity’s need for an energy abundant future for everyone.

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The same thing is happening in electricity contracts. Here are a few green shoots that happened just in the past few weeks:

• Ghana’s energy minister announced that all future power purchase agreements would be published on the ministry website.

• South Africa’s courts ruled that its utility can no longer shield its diesel and coal contracts from the public, removing any excuse not to disclose power contracts too.

• The Asian Development Bank quietly launched a facility to support countries taking steps toward electricity contract disclosure.

Contract transparency in the power sector is approaching a turning point.

All these little steps add up, in my view, to a trend. We’re moving to a place where power contracts – especially those by public utilities with public guarantees – will be routinely disclosed. A small band of energy pirates, led by Rushaiya Ibrahim-Tanko and Mohamed Badissy, have been methodically making this case and quietly supporting steps toward openness wherever we see opportunities.

Yet, here’s one of the ironies of our campaign that has made it so difficult: power contract transparency has too many arguments in its favor.

1. For consumers, it can reduce prices.

2. For investors, it gives better insight into the market to help price offtaker risk.

3. For planners, it can give a fuller picture of the whole power system.

4. For governments, it provides greater clarity on options to grow your economy.

5. For finance ministers and central bankers, it can mitigate debt risk.

6. For governance advocates, it can reduce corruption.

7. For clean energy advocates, it can speed up deployment.

8. For national security types, it can shed light on who’s using energy as a geostrategic lever.

That’s why transparency is the Swiss Army knife of development.

So if it’s such a good idea, why isn’t transparency happening naturally?

Excellent question. I think a lot about the barriers we face.

Two common objections to transparency I hear are pure rubbish.

• Confidentiality clauses. Some claim contracts like PPAs are commercially confidential so cannot legally be disclosed. Yet old contracts can be redacted of private info while disclosure timelines can be baked into future contracts. Solved.

• Legal intellectual property. Some law firms apparently claim power contracts are their proprietary IP. Complete hogwash. These contracts are mostly the same. So why would anyone (except the lawyers) need to rewrite them from scratch? Regardless, countries should move to standard contracts for speed and efficiency. Be like Google.

Some genuine objections exist that need to be confronted – or designed around.

• Inertia. Changing any status quo is always hard. “We’ve always done it this way” is a really dumb answer, but often is the real explanation. Changing requires someone to get out of their chair and take positive action. It’s easier to do nothing. So government leaders can force disclosure. Or private developers can collectively push for it. Or, perhaps, the IMF can set a new standard by requiring PPAs and related liabilities be included in risk reporting.

• Myopic dealmaking. Some hold a concern that switching from secret contracts to open ones will disrupt any negotiation that is currently underway. For instance, the World Bank mothership might like the idea of open contracting as a policy, but the bank’s private sector deal teams object because they have live projects that they think (probably rightly) will get scuttled. Too bad. Your individual deal is not as important as the future of a country.

• Interest group siloes. This one is on my mind a lot these days (and is what sparked this post). When we make the wrong argument to an audience, we lose them. If we’re pitching a finance minister, they might care about debt risk but not much about consumer cost or the generation technology. A climate advocate will care a lot about clean energy competing fairly with fossil fuels but not about investor risk, etc. I’ve found that the best way to get someone to accept your idea is to connect it to an existing priority. Help people solve their immediate problems. Yet if we don’t know what their real priority is, our chance of making a winning argument is low. Asking does not work. We have to build relationships and watch for revealed preferences.

So contract transparency is making headway. We’ll continue to make our case, deploying our Swiss Army Knife approach to different audiences.

I’m confident that open contracting for power will one day be the norm. We’ll forget how we got there, and wonder how it could have ever been another way. The path is yet to be blazed to a world of open power contracts delivering cheap, reliable electrons for everyone. But that path is now running through Accra, Pretoria, and Manila.

But my next thought: why is the World Bank still publishing 276-page reports?

I have some ideas – and a plea.

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No one reads. So why are so many organizations spending so much time and effort publishing long reports?

The World Bank has long known about its weak readership problem. A 2014 internal analysis, “Which World Bank Reports Are Widely Read?” found

About 13 percent of policy reports were downloaded at least 250 times while more than 31 percent of policy reports are never downloaded. Almost 87 percent of policy reports were never cited.

The Washington Post merrily covered that story too while SSIR used it as a hook to ask, “If a Report Is Published and No One Reads It, Did It Really Happen?”

The World Bank is not alone. The United Nations found similar disappointing downloads for the 1,100 reports produced in 2024. The Secretary General explained

Many of these reports are not widely read…. The top 5% of reports are downloaded over 5,500 times, while one in five reports receives fewer than 1,000 downloads. And downloading doesn’t necessarily mean reading.

I’m picking on the World Bank and UN because they’re easy targets. But my fellow think tanks fall (jump?) into the same trap. We use social media, videos, and all kinds of communications tools. But we also write loads of long reports. I recently visited a lovely think tank who proudly decorated their entire lobby with dozens of their report covers. A ChatGTP query estimates 800-1,500 long-form PDF reports were published last year by the dozen most prominent US think tanks.

Most orgs have no clue of the impact of these reports. They can track downloads or media citations, but only rarely can they point to the specific effect a report has on government policy or a real-world outcome. Yet poor readership is a signal that, in my view, likely points to a bigger problem: the report itself.

What are policy reports good for?

That anyone would bother to spend months or years writing a long report they knew few will read suggests they have some implied value. The main reasons to write one:

• Share new data, a new detailed technical analysis, or make a new convincing case to a specific audience. Yes, when these are the goals and only a hefty report can do the trick, they can be useful. Sometimes (I would say rarely) this is the clear purpose.

• Weight as a signal of credibility. Stacks of data, charts, and words create the appearance of deep research, even if the ideas or conclusion might be better conveyed in another format. For some audiences, only something long can be valid. I once had a senior African official demand “the full report” after I shared a short one.

• As a funder deliverable. A report is something concrete. It’s either published or not. You can hold one in your hands. So it’s often what’s shown to donors as proof of activity. “You paid for this.” But outputs are definitely not impact. Some funders are apparently fine with this, but, in my experience, most are not.

I’m sure there are other reasons I’m forgetting. Please email me if you have ideas.

Long reports have a high cost

I have many more reasons why not to write them.

• Waste of money. Add up all the staff salaries, reviewers, editors, designers, publication costs, etc and a single think tank report can easily run into six figures. Signature reports at big official institutions can, all in, run deep into seven figures.

• Tragic waste of time. The opportunity cost to busy people – who should be world-leading experts on vital social, economic, and political issues – is actually mind-boggling. Imagine the social good such smart capable people could do with all the time not spent on long reports.

• Tedious repackaging. Lots of reports I see are mostly cut and paste jobs with little real new information. If you have some new analysis to share, why wrap it in thousands of extra words that have already been written many times elsewhere?

• Mistake activity for action. Some official reports are written because they are mandated by members or parliaments. But think tanks are independent organizations that, in theory, should be deciding what they work on. A think tank is not the UN, so they can choose the problems to tackle and what activities to undertake. Writing a report takes a lot of effort, but it’s often the lazy answer to addressing a wicked problem. (What to do about global poverty or climate change? Write a report!)

• Too often a substitute for progress. This gets to the core purpose of a think tank. Do they exist to stoke egos and provide a soft landing? Or are they built to solve real problems that governments cannot or will not tackle? I lean heavily to the latter.

What’s worse than a new policy report? My 20-year old policy reports!

I’ve contributed to many reports over my career. Two stand out in contrast that greatly shaped my views – and help explain my current antipathy.

Early in my career, I was on the World Bank team that drafted the Africa regional strategy. We spent over a year gathering ideas and writing. Consultations spanned all relevant parts of the Bank, took the team to Ethiopia to meet with President Meles, and then to a group retreat in South Africa. It was eventually published as a glossy report, I’ll guess about 120 pages long, blandly titled the “Strategic Framework for Investment in Africa” in 2003.

I certainly learned a lot (mostly about how the World Bank works) and met some incredibly smart, dedicated people. But I don’t think the report had any meaningful effect on the bank’s strategy, policy advice, or investment behavior. It’s no longer even on worldbank.org. (I think I have a copy buried deep in a box somewhere in my storage unit.) What I can say for sure is that it consumed me and another full time person for 18 months, plus nontrivial chunks of time from the VP, chief economist, operations director, sector directors, country directors, country economists, editors, designers, and other contractors. I’ll conservatively estimate that the report cost at least $2 million directly and probably 2-3x that once all the time of others involved is added in. And for what? I cannot say.

A few years later, I co-led a working group at the Center for Global Development that was very explicitly trying to reshape the African Development Bank from the outside. The bank had just come through a near-bankruptcy, had utterly lost credibility with its own shareholders, and had just been forcibly relocated to Tunis after a civil war broke out in Cote d’Ivoire. Its survival was not assured.

So we assembled a group of 16 experts to float some ideas to incoming President Donald Kaberuka and to pressure the board to give him space to rebuild. The output of our effort was, “Building Africa’s Development Bank: Six Recommendations for the AfDB and its Shareholders.” The whole thing was 27 pages, with just 11 pages of core text. Its heart were three sharp recs for the president (to focus on growth and infrastructure) and three for the board (to back off and let Kaberuka do his job).

We were deliberately crisp and provocative as a way to constructively stir the pot. Several of us from the working group flew to Tunis to brief the board in a lively exchange. I don’t know for sure if we made an appreciable difference or were pushing on an open door. Yet Kaberuka reoriented around growth and infrastructure and, by all accounts, was the most effective leader the bank has ever had. The shareholders, predictably, did not back off.

The main lessons I draw from comparing these two reports: be crystal clear about your purpose, know your role, and make it only as long as it needs to be.

Or… if a report is not what’s needed, do something else.

To make this point, here’s a quick summary of another career-altering experience. Around the same time I joined CGD, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became Nigeria’s finance minister and was grappling with what to do with $33bn in inherited external debt, mainly to rich governments like the US and UK. She asked my boss Nancy Birdsall for any helpful analysis we might provide and, being the new guy, Nancy asked me to take a look and come up with ideas. The US had just helped post-Saddam Iraq get debt relief while Argentina was negotiating with commercial creditors for a deal too and, fortunately, Nigeria had just built up savings from an oil windfall.

One win-win idea that seemed obvious was to have Nigeria buy back its debt at a steep discount, using Iraq and Argentina haircuts as benchmarks. But no one – neither the Nigerians nor the western governments – wanted to be the first to propose this. So after floating the idea with lots of people for feedback, I wrote down the discounted buyback idea in an ultra simple 2-page note. A whole long, complicated story short, the 2-pager was used by negotiators as the starting guide for an eventual deal. The CGD note played a small but catalytic part in saving Nigerian taxpayers $18 billion and opening the door for the country to access new borrowing.

I cannot say for sure that a deal would never have been struck without our note, but I am absolutely confident – and was told so by a senior US Treasury negotiator – that a long report would not have had the same impact as our digestible 2-pager. There was no “full report” needed to share this idea and have it reach the target audience. Instead, it was the opposite.

So, sure, go ahead, write a report if that’s what the world needs, but don’t do it by lazy default

My plea to fellow think tankers is, before you write your next report, ask yourself a few questions upfront:

• What’s our objective?

• Who do we need to reach?

• How to best convey our analysis and ideas to that specific audience?

• What kind of language, tone, and format will give us the best shot at impact?

• How short can we make it?

If the answer to these questions leads you to write a long policy report, fine. If not, please do something else. You – and the world – will thank me for it.

The world has for too long overlooked one of its most abundant—and excitable—sources of clean energy. Every day, millions of dogs generate continuous kinetic tail motion, yet nearly 100% of this energy is lost. Until now.

Introducing K-9 Kinetic Power™

The Energy for Growth Hub is proud to launch its first direct-to-consumer product, K-9 Kinetic Power™ (K9KP). Developed with LabradorLabX at Stanford, our breakthrough system captures motion and converts it into usable electricity. Using a lightweight, carbon fiber tail-mounted micro-generator and a smart home docking pad, K9KP™ transforms each wag into usable energy.

K9KP™ stores excess energy in a lithium-tail battery system, allowing consumers to bank peak wag periods (owner returns home, treats, squirrel sightings) for use during low-wag hours (naps, time out).

How it works: Our proprietary Wag-to-Watt™ converter leverages the following relationship:

• Average wag frequency: 3–5 wags per second

• Average tail displacement: 0.25 meters per wag

• Estimated force per wag: 2 newtons

This yields: Power per dog ≈ ½ × force × distance × wag frequency
= 0.5 × 2 N × 0.25 m × 4 wags/sec
= 1 watt per active dog

Global scale

With an estimated 900 million dogs worldwide, even modest wag capture could generate scaleable, distributed, renewable capacity— equivalent to a large nuclear power plant, but much cuter. On sale soon.

Because the future of energy isn’t just renewable—it’s retrievable.

But ridiculous goals make governments look unserious. And arguments about energy choices that are not grounded in reality actually undermine the case for supporting nuclear power.

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Nuclear analyst Hamna Tariq and I posted Let’s Get Real About Nuclear in Africa, explaining the three kinds of hoopla that we believe undermine nuclear progress. Here’s what we argue:

Yes, countries across Africa are jumping on the nuclear bandwagon

Lots of countries are eager for clean firm power to run mines, industry, and data centers. The World Bank dropped its nuclear ban, opening the door to extra support for new aspirants. And major powers like Russia, China, and the United States are aggressively competing for nuclear exports. Africa is responding.

• Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal have all joined the global pledge to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.

• Guinea, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have recently signed civil nuclear agreements with foreign developers.

• Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia have all announced ambitious near term nuclear targets.

• Our “nuclear readiness” scoring (based on specific steps rather than just announcements) finds that Egypt and South Africa are ready now while six countries (Algeria, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Uganda) could be ready by about 2030. Another 13 countries could be ready before 2050 if they take additional steps.

So Africa’s interest in nuclear power is real.

Yet claims must be grounded in reality

We should separate genuine progress from outlandish announcements. Governments and nuclear advocates do themselves no favor when they make absurd claims or set wholly unrealistic goals.

Hamna and I point to three types of hoopla we think is a problem for both countries and the industry.

1. Too big

Everyone knows not to put all your eggs in one basket. In electricity, the general rule for risk management and sound planning is that no one power plant should be more than 10% of national capacity. That prevents vulnerability to the power system if it goes down or possibly bankrupting the country from one bad project. Yet Niger announced in September 2025 plans to build 2,000 MW of nuclear power, or 4x the current grid, with Russia.

Even if you dismiss the Sahelian junta as Russian propaganda, other more sober countries are making similar mistakes. Kenya announced a first nuclear development of 2,000 MW with plans to reach 6,000 MW against a current installed capacity of only about 3,400 MW. Uganda is publicly targeting at least 1,000 MW of nuclear by 2031, which would nearly double current capacity.

Ambition is good, but you can overdo it. If you’re trying to convince a skeptical marketplace — and your own public — that you’re serious, going too big is no way to do it.

2. Too soon

Nuclear is far more complex than other energy sources, so preparing to build, regulate, and manage nuclear power plants takes decades. Burkina Faso has almost none of the preparatory agencies in place yet claims to be on the cusp of construction to build the country’s first plant (again with Russia — anyone see a pattern??). Guinea, Togo, and Burundi have also made public claims of imminent nuclear plans.

Rwanda is among the most serious and capable governments. Yet they have floated a goal of 1,000 MW by 2031, even though the country is still in exploratory stages and has not signed a construction agreement or initiated vendor selection.

Ghana, which is much closer to ready than any of its neighbors, has announced aggressive timelines too. Officials sometimes promise an operational plant by the early 2030s when late 2030s is more likely.

3. No, nuclear will not solve your access gap

Nuclear power is attractive because of scale, reliability, a small footprint, and low emissions. These attributes suit industry and mature utilities that need large-scale long-term energy sources. African countries need this kind of power for mining, industry, data centers, and rapidly growing cities.

But building your first nuclear power plant is not cheap or fast. So it’s never going to be a speedy solution for first-time access. If you want to get basic lighting to everyone in a country (say by 2030), building a nuclear power plant is just dumb.

This doesn’t stop advocates and analysts from trying to justify nuclear as a ready solution to Africa’s electricity access gap. For instance, officials at the 2025 Nuclear Energy Innovation Summit in Kigali repeatedly invoked 600 million people without access as a reason to support nuclear power. I hear this mistake all the time.

Fortunately, the 2026 nuclear summit highlights industrialization and energy security rather than basic access. Yay!

Nuclear needs sober reality over nonsense

For those of us open to nuclear power and wanting to support Africa’s nuclear ambitions, we have to reject hoopla and illogical justifications. Countries need to grow and diversify their power systems. They need scaleable firm clean power for jobs and economic growth. They need energy for more mining, minerals processing, and industrialization. Nuclear power could help. Silly statements and fantasy goals do not.

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Yet I’m struck by how many organizations seem to stop their impact reporting at the number of events hosted or reports published – often without even explaining the purpose of such things toward any specific goal. Meetings and pubs are outputs, not impact. And when disconnected from a particular aim, they aren’t even a clear step toward progress.

Getting your name in the New York Times or speaking on a panel at Davos is a pretty good sign of influence (in certain circles) but that’s not impact either. Maybe some funders want their grantees in the press or on a stage, but most that I know don’t care about that. They want their donations to lead to some meaningful change in the world. They’ll support a meeting or report or their grantee in the press if it leads to that change. But those are all means, not ends.

I’ve written recently about lessons I’ve learned from Nancy Birdsall on how to build an effective think tank, including a relentless focus on outcomes over egos. I also wrote up how a few orgs worked together over many years to remove the World Bank’s nuclear ban as a window into how think tanks can get sh*t done in Washington DC. That policy change aimed to expand the range of clean energy technologies available to poor countries so they can grow faster. It was accomplished with zero reports, zero public events, and made the NY Times only after it was all over. Now, we’re laser focused on helping the policy change lead to actual projects and, eventually, to more energy creating jobs and lifting livelihoods.

This can all be confusing. People conflate outputs, impacts, and results all the time. A whole industry of nonprofit consulting exists to help organizations and foundations figure it out. It can seem like a pedantic debate over terms. But clarity of purpose and what counts as impact goes to the heart of why philanthropy and their grantees exist.

Think tanks have an especially steep challenge since they are not doing direct service delivery but trying to dance a two-step toward impact. A nonprofit vaccinating kids or delivering solar home systems can report on the exact number of people they helped and measure how much their individual lives changed. But altering a government rule is not like vaccinating kids or installing solar panels. Think tanks are trying to influence policies that, if successful, might lead to more vaccinations or lower electricity tariffs for an entire country. Success reaches many more people (scale!) but attribution (or a precise ROI) is far more tenuous. That raises the bar on think tanks to explain what they do, why, and then tell a plausible story when it works.

A Simple 6-Step Model for Think Tank Impact

After years of trying different things at the Center for Global Development and the Energy for Growth Hub, here’s how I now think about the impact value chain and how think tanks can explain it. None of this is unique to me. Others may use different words. I’m just sharing what I’ve learned (so far) from working with at least seven think tanks over 30+ years.

One quick caveat: this schematic is linear for simplicity, but think tank impact never happens linearly. Every individual effort at policy change is going to follow its own crazy path of twists, stop-starts, and pivots. The military maxim that no war plans survive first contact also applies to think tank impact. Thinking through steps toward your goal is useful. But a rigid plan is almost immediately useless. I’m just sharing a crude mental model I use to think about how different steps may lead eventually to impact – and the kinds of things we try to track along the way to see how we’re really doing. This approach also helps us tell a credible impact story after a big win.

To think through the path to success, I like to have, in this order:

1. Ultimate goal. Start with a shared final objective such as people living healthier lives or having decent jobs.

2. A near-term result. Posit a credible idea of how to do that by solving some specific problem standing in the way, like reducing drug prices or attracting more capital to build power plants.

3. Impact. Identify a specific mechanism to solve that problem, like changing a rule or creating a new initiative. This is the think tank sweet spot.

4. Influence. Have multiple ideas for how we might spark the rule change or initiative, such as figuring out exactly who needs to act, what they really care about, and how to convince them. This is think tank strategy.

5. Outputs. Conduct activities to share, shape, and sell the idea. This is think tank tactics.

6. Inputs. Find people and money to get started. This is think tank operations.

So what exactly to track and report?

We can then track progress in the exact reverse order. Here is my crude schematic along with examples of what to document or measure.

1. Inputs are people and money you need to operate. Reporting how we’re doing on recruitment and fundraising is a good signal, but of course just the first step.

2. Outputs are activities that could eventually lead to later steps. These should be tracked and can sometimes be quantified. But be careful: quantity does not tell us anything meaningful and is usually misleading about effectiveness. That’s because “100 meetings” may be far less valuable to reaching the end goal than “one important phone call with the right person.” I’ve also found that one killer graphic or a good 1-pager can change minds more than a 125-page report.

3. Influence is tracking proxies for credibility with target audiences. This might mean New York Times quotes if that really helps us move the ball, but more often it’s things like use of our work by policymakers or requests for briefings from the Interagency or Hill staff. These are signs that we are reaching our audience and responding to a pressing demand, not just throwing out clever analysis. Again, quantifying this can be misleading and create weird incentives. Testifying to a Congressional subcommittee ten times might be far less influential than one White House request for a 5-minute call.

4. Impact is the target action. This is the think tank sweet spot. We know we’re having an impact when something concrete changes in the real world and we can trace our role in making it happen. At the Energy for Growth Hub, we explain this through our Impact Stories (ten, soon to be eleven!). I wrote more about why we landed on this approach with Sarah Jane Staats. It’s still a work in progress but far better than counting publications or press quotes.

5. Results are near-term steps that help, but are not quite all the way. These are the intended direct effects of the think tank’s impact toward the ultimate goal. Clear attribution is sometimes possible but often not. Did the rule change we sparked result in lower prices or was something else going on in the market? Did the new initiative we helped launch actually lead to more investment? We need to do our best to try to follow (or even shape) the effects, but we also accept this ambiguity. Our donors understand the world is messy.

6. Ultimate goals are the North Star. This is the world we want to create. Ideally, the intermediate results played some role, catalyzed by our impact step. But attribution here is truly difficult. Life expectancy goes up, but did lower drug prices from our rule change play a role? Incomes rise, but how much of that is due to more energy investment from our new initiative? Rough orders of magnitude and direction of trends may be the best to hope for. But always having an eye on an ultimate goal keeps us grounded and focused on the mission.

None of this is science. Trying to pretend think tank impact is a quantifiable linear process is a mistake. Yet merely listing your reports or media mentions is not even close to good enough.

Think tanks have a tremendous role to play in making public policy more effective and helping build a better world. That’s why the onus is on us to explain what we do, when it’s working… and what counts as impact.

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A few thoughts:

1. Nuclear bans are falling fast.

The move follows a similar step at the World Bank five months ago and the US Development Finance Corporation five years ago.

2. The anti-nuclear holdouts are few (and all in rich Europe).

All 50 members of the AsDB from Asia voted in favor of the change. Of the 19 “non-regionals,” three held out, with Germany and Austria opposed while Luxembourg abstained. (So, yes, the richest country in the world doesn’t think Thailand or Indonesia should have access to the latest energy technology. That’s quite a look.)

3. The Asian Dev Bank can now jump ahead of its sister World Bank.

Most of the World Bank’s management went along with the change only grudgingly, largely forced by a few shareholders like the US, and a late conversion by its president. In contrast, the new AsDB President Masato Kanda and his team seem far more enthusiastic. Let’s see who supports a new reactor first. Given the vibes, I would bet on the AsDB.

4. Pressure will now build on the African Development Bank and other development institutions.

Agencies like to follow each other. The new president at the African Development Bank will undoubtedly have to ask, “Why not us?” Same for many of the other development finance groups with legacy bans.

5. If you care about energy security and diversifying mineral supply chains, this is pretty big.

The opening to nuclear policy will support borrowing members’ goals for industrial growth and energy security. Yay!

6. If you care about retiring coal plants, this could be huge.

The AsDB has been at the forefront of trying to reduce future coal use and replace the needed energy with lower emission sources. But governments are understandably hesitant to reject coal until they have a better alternative. Like in Wyoming, small nuclear reactors could be a good fit.

7. Let’s not get too over-excited. Nextgen nuclear is still niche.

Getting the AsDB to finance its first reactor will take time, and the technology will not be a viable near-term option for all countries. In Southeast Asia, for instance, we find that only 4 of the 9 ASEAN members will be ready by 2030. In South Asia, it’s only 3 countries out of 8.

8. Reality checks can be useful too.

Support for countries’ nuclear ambitions is beneficial. Yet as the nuclear hype-cycle churns, it may be just as constructive for the development banks to provide sober analysis to politicians with FOMO. The AsDB is extremely well-placed to play this role. As Gyude Moore and Marli Kasdan recently argued, nuclear reality-checks could be a core contribution for the African Development Bank too.

People like Nancy Birdsall.

I witnessed radical team building when I took a job at a brand new think tank, the Center for Global Development, more than two decades ago. Nancy had just started it along with Ed Scott. Nancy was the wonky researcher known for fighting poverty in Latin America and global inequality. Ed was a gruff teddy bear with a big heart who decided to use the fortune he made in the internet hardware business to help poor people. What started with a random late night documentary about Nicaraguan debt became the birth of CGD in November 2001. At the time, Washington was reeling from 9/11 and Nancy had to create a new institution from scratch.

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Not long after, I found myself in the upper floors of the Peterson Institute (then just IIE) meeting with Nancy and Sonal Shah. I’d already left LSE for the World Bank and was looking for a career path that would be a bit more creative. I pitched Nancy and Sonal on a few random ideas related to investment in Africa and the next day Nancy called, “Hi Todd. Yes, come do that. And whatever else you can think of.” The job was a license to dig deep, think big, and run free.

Last week, I had the tremendous honor to give a short tribute to Nancy at the 10th anniversary of CGD’s Birdsall House Conference on Gender Equality. I’ve worked at 7 think tanks over my career, so I know something about them and different styles of their leaders. In my brief remarks, I tried to share the lessons I learned from Nancy, most of which I deliberately harvested to build the Energy for Growth Hub.

So here are a few Birdsall House Rules that stuck.

1. Impact is not about you. It’s about evidence, relevance, and real-life people.

A sign outside the board room quotes Ed Scott, “CGD is not a sandbox for economists.” He and Nancy were adamant that policy change had to be based on evidence but that the evidence must be relevant. An effective think tank is not about the egos of the staff and its leadership. If you just want to show your peers how clever you are, then go back to academia. Policy research must be about advancing the mission. For CGD, that was creating economic opportunities for poor people. At the Energy for Growth Hub, it’s building a world where electricity is cheap and reliable for everyone.

2. Building teams is about hiring smart people with a shared mission – and then letting them run free.

Nancy often bet on young (mostly lesser-known) rising talent. That was me. And Michael Clemens, Ruth Levine, Sheila Herrling, Brian Deese, Amanda Glassman, Charles Kenny, Justin Sandefur, Vijaya Ramachandran, Scott Morris, Molly Kinder, and many, many more. While Nancy kept our feet to the fire on impact, she never meddled. She created space for exploration, where failure was ok, and pushed us to make low probability-high return bets. I’m following the same talent scouting + policy freedom recipe at the Hub.

3. Getting stuff done requires hard-headed pragmatism.

Nancy and the team had to grow up fast. CGD was born weeks after 9/11, just as President Bush was launching wars in Afghanistan and then the invasion of Iraq. But that troubled stressful time was also a window for bipartisan cooperation on development policy. By working with the administration and both parties on the Hill, Nancy and her team helped to shape the launches of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, PEPFAR, the President’s Malaria Initiative, and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative. Those early days for CGD, driven by Nancy’s relentless pragmatism, helped to create what now seems like the Heyday of Global Development.

Not to overdraw the parallel, but I started the Energy for Growth Hub in 2018, just as Washington was absorbing the chaos of the first Trump administration. By following Nancy’s pragmatic playbook, we were able to shape the creation of the US Development Finance Corporation, then lift its nuclear ban, and help to make energy abundance everywhere a bipartisan issue. I hope we’re entering the Heyday for Global Energy Abundance.

4. Carry yourself with humor and humility.

Nancy was always serious about her work but never about herself. She rejected ceremony unless it clearly advanced the mission. She had no time for pointless events with lots of empty words (ahem). If you’re going to bother to speak, say something worth listening to. “Don’t be boring” is an unofficial mantra of the Hub too.

5. Keep your edge by staying curious and challenging orthodoxy.

Nancy’s first big recruit was Bill Easterly who had just been thrown out of the World Bank for dissent. It was a brilliant hire with a clear message to the rest of us: it’s okay, even good, to upset people in power. When warranted, we were free to take aim at the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Gordon Brown’s International Finance Facility, Jeff Sachs’s Millennium Villages, and more. When powerful people would call to complain (and they often did), Nancy would defend her team and then encourage us to keep it up. In this way, and at contentious research seminars, she actively fostered internal debate and disagreement. That’s why CGD – and now the Hub – do not take institutional positions.

6. Clear a path for the next generation of policy stars, especially women.

Nancy earned her PhD at Yale in 1979 when women in the upper echelons of economics were rare. So she learned to interrupt. If you know Nancy, you know she interrupts a lot. And she modeled that behavior for younger women on her team, especially when some blowhard was holding court. She wanted more women in high places – and for those women to speak their minds.

Ahead of my little talk last week, I texted a few alumni to canvas ideas. Sheila Herrling — who I think of as a model for speaking your mind and a guru for building teams — replied immediately with a long list of Nancy’s greatest hits that opened with this:

“I love Nancy so much and learned so much from her. For most of her career she was a woman ahead of her time, breaking the glass for the rest of us.”

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Alas, Mission 300 risks a similar fate. It’s an incredibly ambitious effort. The World Bank and African Development Bank aim to connect 300 million people to electricity by 2030. On one level, I love it. Every person on earth must have electricity. 300 million is a lot of people. And 2030 is, like, tomorrow. I want M300 to be a smashing success.

But there’s a problem. As Devex reports;

Mission 300… was repeatedly cited by [World Bank president Ajay] Banga as an example of a project with tremendous job potential. He also waved off criticism that M300 should focus on electrifying businesses over homes. Banga called that “bunk.” The goal of M300 is not about “one light and one fan in the roof, but productive capacity electricity, which allows them to be capable of generating something economically,” Banga said.

That all sounds great. M300 should absolutely be about productive capacity for jobs. Jobs are what development is all about. And creating jobs is what Banga is betting the World Bank’s future on. But the World Bank just released its primary progress indicator: new connections.

Here’s the World Bank’s new M300 Progress Dashboard. It shows 32 million connected so far (since July 2023) across 84 Bank-financed projects and reports on track to hit 189 million.

Pretty good. And new connections is a perfectly fine metric if you care about giving extremely poor people their first lights.

But it’s completely divorced from jobs. It’s the energy equivalent of tracking 2nd grade reading as your advanced engineering goal.

A cynic could wave this off as just a disconnect between the Bank leadership’s talking points and the technical teams reporting the data. It could be also reflective of massive confusion in the energy sector that so often conflates first connections for the poor with large scale energy for growth.

Yet this disconnect between connections and jobs is more than a miscommunication problem because Banga is fighting for the Bank’s existential survival in a high-risk political environment. He has to show relevance and that the organization can deliver. I don’t think it’s overstated to say that his legacy – and perhaps the future of the World Bank itself – could depend on what happens with M300.

That’s why the progress metric has real consequences. And why I have 5 big questions.

Quick primer on how “energy access” has multiple meanings

Before I get to my skepticism, a little background on definitions. (If you know all about this already, jump to the next header.)

A “connection” could be a physical wire linking a building to the national grid or throwing a solar panel on a roof or even just (according to some) owning a solar lantern.

These are all different and provide different services. IMO, a better approach than the physical hardware is a minimum level of actual electricity consumption. How much depends who you ask.

• Historically, 100 kWh per person. The standard definition from the International Energy Agency for many years has been 100 kWh per person per year in cities and 50 kWh in rural areas.

• The IEA now has 3 levels: The IEA’s methodology (latest version; see page 99) now uses roughly 10, 100, and 250 kWh per person per year for what they call basic, essential, and extended bundles. IEA explains:

“Access to electricity entails a household having initial access to sufficient electricity to power a basic bundle of energy services – at the minimum, several lightbulbs, phone charging, a radio and potentially a fan or television which is broadly equivalent to a range of around 50-75 kWh per household per year… the “essential bundle” includes four light bulbs for four hours per day, a fan for three hours per day, and a television for two hours per day, which equates to roughly 500 kWh per household per year…. The “extended bundle” implies a refrigerator, four hours for lighting, four hours for TV, and six hours for a fan, which equates to roughly 1,250 kWh per household per year.” [Note: per capita figures assume ~5 people per household.]

• The World Bank says let’s use 5 Tiers. About a decade ago, a team at the World Bank proposed a “multi tier framework” with 5 levels covering capacity, duration, affordability, reliability, and other characteristics. Each tier has an implied minimum annual per person consumption (using the minimum daily household capacity times 365 divided by 5 people) of 0.9, 15, 73, 250, and 600 kWh.

• The Modern Energy Minimum is 1,000 kWh. Colleagues and I have proposed as a new metric a 250 kWh per capita residential threshold (equivalent to the IEA’s extended bundle or the Bank’s Tier 4), plus a non-residential average of 750 kWh covering industry, commerce, and agriculture. We think this is a good metric for tracking a second step after initial access because it’s both higher and wider.

• For reference, Americans use 12,700 kWh per person each year, of which 38% is residential so an average of about 4,800 kWh at home. So, more than 5000x the World Bank’s Tier 1 access. (You can guess why I’m making this comparison….)

For ease, here are all the access levels in one little table.

My questions for the M300 progress tracker

Given that initial access is a very important goal in itself (yes, everyone should have electricity at home, even if it starts tiny), but the World Bank keeps insisting that M300 is really about jobs, jobs, jobs. Here are my questions:

1. Is the World Bank counting Tier 1 as a connection?

Delivering a solar lantern to a poor household is not the same as a reliable grid connection. Both can be useful. But they are not the same. Some parts of the World Bank want to count any initial electricity as a connection for M300, while others want some slightly higher level of minimum service. The specific debate has been between Tier 1 versus Tier 3 (or 0.9 vs 73 kWh).

This is not trivial. Picking Tier 1 will make it much easier to reach that huge number of 300 million people. Opting for Tier 3 will mean far fewer connections but greater impact for each one.

The progress tracker does not specify, but I understand that it is counting all tiers as a new connection. In other words, Tier 1 is the minimum standard for M300.

I fully understand the impulse to set the bar low. No one wants to fail on a high-profile flagship effort with the target number literally in the name of the initiative. Picking the lowest possible threshold makes it much easier to declare success in five years.

Yet Tier 1 is not even 1 kWh per day. It’s 0.02% of what a typical American uses at home. If they are really using this standard, the Bank should be transparent and fully own its decision by explaining clearly what it means: lighting for a few hours a day and not much more. And definitely not jobs.

Setting the bar so low may have headline benefits but comes with political risk too. Most people (and politicians) have a common sense understanding of what a “connection” usually entails. So when an org sets the bar too low, they invite blowback. Just ask Power Africa when they faced a similar backlash after counting lanterns as connections.

2. Why not track residential electricity use at all five tiers?

If the World Bank already has its own system for identifying five tiers of service, why not just track them all and be transparent that some projects provide very basic connections while others are helping move people up the energy ladder? This would mean counting all new and improved connections. That’s slightly different but entirely in the spirit of the M300 – and closer to the impact on employment.

And here’s a gift: tracking all 5 tiers can be done for free. My team has already built a platform that can estimate electricity usage in every building on the continent, so we have the data. Here’s a sample of what it looks like for Senegal and Zambia in 2020:

3. Will the Bank report grid versus offgrid?

Energy has unfortunately gotten sucked into the culture wars. Until recently, energy access has, for many constituencies, meant delivering offgrid solar to the poor. This makes sense for some services for some people. But the push for universal electrification from a purely development perspective should be agnostic to both delivery system and fuel.

Most people in the rich world have no clue whatsoever where their electrons come from. They just know it works when they push a button.

The same should apply to poor people in poor countries. If you care about just getting basic service to very poor people, then offgrid solar is going to win on cost and speed. If you care about raising livelihoods and creating decent jobs, then you need sufficient reliable electricity at scale. But then you need grids and utilities, while accepting that diesel and/or large-scale gas may be the best option in some places for some uses.

Of course the World Bank board does not agree. Some (mainly European) shareholders want to use energy policy for climate mitigation goals and thus want absolutely no fossil fuels, with a big preference for offgrid. The US and a few others want the Bank to focus more on growth outcomes and go back to being ‘all of the above’ on fuels. The World Bank management is trying to split the difference so has created convoluted rules on gas. M300 has so far largely avoided the fuels debate but has said it will be half on-grid and half offgrid. For transparency, the tracker should at least show this split.

4. Where is M300’s progress indicator that matters for firms & jobs?

The debate over whether to prioritize families or firms is healthy IMO. The traditional access community targets households. Moussa Blimpo and Ken Opalo have weighed in decisively on the side of firms. The usual answer I get is “why not do both’? Yes, sure, I agree. Let’s do both. But if we are doing both then we need to measure both.

If M300 is really about jobs, then why is there no progress indicator tied to how electricity affects employment or firm productivity? New household connections are not a proxy. Even “new business connections” are really not right either since the problem facing business is not the initial connection but the cost and reliability of power.

I keep hearing that the Bank is working on a metric but no practical ideas have surfaced. I see (h/t Katie Auth) that the AfDB has a new electricity project in Niger with the dual goals of boosting (a) the access rate and (b) the manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP. At least that‘s headed in the right direction. This kind of approach can work in individual projects and country plans.

M300 could apply a simpler metric across all countries that ties directly to firm productivity and jobs: reliability. The excellent study by the World Bank’s Justice Mensah shows outages are a job killer. So, M300 could track reliability in each country and set a broad improvement goal, like a 50% reduction of outages in urban areas. That would be a game-changer.

5. Why, why, why, oh why, is the World Bank M300 tracker only counting its own projects?

I’ll say it: Donor attribution is stupid.

If you care about development outcomes, it should not matter who gets credit or bean-counting the source of each dollar. Maybe it helps if you are trying to justify spending to a skeptical parliament. Or if you’re a skeptical NGO and your real goal is to hold the World Bank’s feet to the fire.

But from a development perspective, attribution is not just a futile exercise, but it creates all kinds of negative ripple effects by stripping agency away from the governments who should be accountable to their citizens, not an international organization.

The whole idea is an accounting fiction anyway. All “World Bank projects” involve host governments, contractors, co-financiers, and especially the cooperation of local actors. “World Bank money” comes from repayments from its borrowing members plus a subsidy from other members to subsidize lower interest rates. Many energy projects also involve “World Bank guarantees” which are also a complete fiction since (dirty little secret!) those guarantees are ultimately backed by the host governments. If an energy project goes bad and a guarantee is called, it’s just added to the country’s national debt. (Ask Zambia.) The World Bank is not spending its own money or taking any risk itself in any meaningful sense. It’s just acting as a loan agent and debt collector for others. So attribution for connections is misguided in both practice and theory.

Worse, the World Bank taking public credit for specific connections undercuts the entire idea of M300’s country ownership. A well-known tenet of development is that countries must lead the way with outsiders providing follow-on technical and financial backing. That’s why M300 asked countries to write national compacts. (Each of these are more tailored to each country, but they follow a set template and their topline goals are all identical: universal household access plus a target for clean cooking, renewables, and finance raised.) So if M300 is about the World Bank, AfDB, and all its partners working with host governments to deliver connections, why do we need to attribute each new connection to one financier? We don’t.

If Senegal or Tanzania successfully electrifies all their citizens, isn’t it in everyone’s best interest that the Senegalese and Tanzania governments fully own that outcome?

A better way: just track outcomes and collectively share credit.

Adding it all up provides an easy agenda to help M300 achieve its bigger goals

Taking each of my 5 questions leads to a simple 5-steps to help fix the big disconnect:

1. Clarify the methodology of what counts.

2. Track new and improved connections (using our platform or something better if they have it).

3. Report on-grid versus off-grid.

4. Add an indicator (any indicator!) that actually matters to firms, such as reliability or share of industrial energy.

5. Forget the folly of donor attribution and just report on what actually matters: final outcomes.

The World Bank is wonderful & maddening

Ajay Banga’s instinct to make M300 about job creation is exactly right. His organization is filled with some of the smartest and most dedicated people. Its mission to end global poverty is amazing. The world is clearly better with the World Bank than without it.

But the World Bank is also maddening. It can be insular, hubristic, and resistant to change. It’s often blatantly focused more on its own survival than on achieving its mission. It’s too often more worried about hitting its own corporate indicators than delivering development.

M300 is a chance for the organization to show it can accelerate electrification in Africa and prove its continued importance to creating jobs. But I think it can only succeed if it’s far more transparent — and gets the progress metrics right.

Now back to Eat More Electrons…

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the recent excitement over Africa’s solar imports has me worried.

The (terrific!) think tank Ember released stunning data on African imports of Chinese solar panels showing a 60% surge in just 12 months. This has gotten a lot of play, mainly celebratory. The New York Times for instance reported positively on the trend while David Wallace-Wells in a reflective Times essay on the future of climate policy suggests that solar panel imports could end energy poverty while making both fossil fuels and the United States irrelevant.

I have concerns.

First, some throat clearing: Yes, I ❤️ solar.

Lest I be misunderstood or falsely accused (you know who you are) of technology tribalism: solar power is good. It’s a mature, proven technology. It can be very cheap at the margin. Africa does not have enough of it. I wish African countries had a lot more. And I’ve argued elsewhere that the World Bank could help the continent build lots more solar farms if it was honest about subsidies.

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So the surge in solar panel imports is partly good news. At one level, Africa is finally tapping into its huge solar radiation potential. For individual consumers who suffer from an unreliable grid, installing panels on your own roof helps liberate you from a dysfunctional utility. For many businesses too, solar panels can help cut daytime power costs and keep things running when the grid goes out. Some can cut the cord entirely.

It’s also good news for the environment. Solar panels, especially in places like Nigeria and DRC, are very likely displacing diesel generators. This is positive for local air (and noise) pollution and a lower carbon footprint.

So lots of reasons to cheer the surge in Chinese solar panel imports.

Next, a clarification: The data show panel imports, not installation of solar farms.

I truly hope that I’m wrong here, but panel imports are likely mostly for rooftop or small systems, not utility-scale solar farms. (It’s possible that we’re just seeing a lag here, but solar farm construction is pretty quick, typically 12-18 months, so we’ll know for sure soon.)

Here are six African countries showing Chinese solar panel imports (from Ember) overlaid with solar capacity additions above 1 MW (from Global Energy Monitor).

And here is the same data aggregated for all of Africa.

Early conclusion: Panel imports from China are going way up, but solar farms of any meaningful size are not.

So what’s wrong with a bottom-up small-is-beautiful solar revolution?

Lots.

1. What’s better for (some) private individuals may not be so great for everyone else.

This is a classic collective action dilemma. Some consumers will save on bills and provide themselves more reliable power. But just as Lauren Gilbert explained why every diesel generator is a policy failure, so too is every grid-connected consumer who now needs solar panels as backup. If I was living in DRC or South Africa I too would feel let down by a failed power system. And I would do whatever I could to get power, the rest be damned. This is a perfectly rational response.

For those living with energy abundance in the US or Europe and thinking ‘wow, this is great,’ I have a different view. I too can romanticize about being a rugged individual living free and bucking the system. During the pandemic I raised my own chickens. But there’s a very good reason I don’t grow my own food, fetch my own water, or produce my own electricity: It’s far more efficient for me to pay someone else to do it at scale. Now that more people turn to a workaround to make up for a failed power system is not cause for celebration, but a grudging acceptance of second-best.

Grid-scale national power provides lower unit costs via economies of scale while shared infrastructure spread the costs over time and across geographies. All of these system-wide benefits are lost when consumers exit. The result is higher average costs and unfair burden sharing. Some individuals gain, but the overall economy is left worse off.

2. Consumer defections are especially bad for equity since tariffs effectively become a regressive tax on poor consumers.

One major reason everyone in Africa doesn’t have solar panels on their roof already is because it requires upfront investment. By definition, richer consumers can afford more so they are much more likely to add imported solar panels. Those that stay connected to the grid for nighttime or cloudy days are then freeriding on the system, leaving grid costs increasingly borne by those who can’t afford the part-time exit option. The overall result is regressive: shared costs shift from richer to poorer. This is not unique to Africa as the same dynamic is happening in California. But we should not pretend the solar import boomlet isn’t mostly benefiting the relatively better-off.

(If we get future data showing that the panel surge mostly benefitted new first-time connections or household system upgrades, rather than replacing diesel gensets or enabling grid exits, then I will retract this concern.)

3. Grid exits put even more pressure on distressed utilities.

Electricity is a public good and utilities provide public services. Until storage technology improves greatly, we should reject the sentimental notion that economies can thrive without utilities. We still need them. If we are entirely privatizing and decentralizing electricity – every home and business for themselves! – that’s a world that is much poorer and unequal than one with financially-viable utilities and shared costs for collective infrastructure. Let’s not surrender just yet.

But utilities will continue to bleed customers until their service is better than the alternative. That’s why utilities should be focused on service quality to keep their highest-paying consumers. They should jump into taking advantage of cheap panels too. Building large-scale solar farms and integrating them into the grid (balanced by other dispatchable sources) would make more sense than trying to regulate away consumer exits. Such an approach would benefit everyone. And a big step forward would be for utilities to embrace open competitive procurement, not falling back into signing unsolicited deals and keeping details secret.

4. A fragmented solar power system ultimately hurts long-term job growth by reinforcing low-productivity.

The bigger macroeconomic effect will be via the competitiveness of firms. How is, say, a Kenyan manufacturer running its own solar + storage system supposed to realistically compete with a Vietnamese peer paying $0.07/kWh for power that’s 99% reliable? It can’t.

Distributed solar can theoretically work for some companies, such as those that

• Don’t care when they get power, like a farm that can happily run an irrigation pump intermittently;

• Are not sensitive to prices, like a hotel that can pass higher energy costs on to their customers; or

• Serve a captive local market insulated from competition, such as a protected industry or non-tradeable services like retail.

Everyone else is stuck. Tough luck for companies that need 24/7 low-cost power. Or are highly price sensitive. Or hope to compete with foreign firms enjoying cheap grid power. Energy-intensive exports can forget it.

That’s why running an economy on cheap Chinese solar panels with no grid will mean an already low-productivity economy will become further mired in a low-productivity equilibrium. Millions of jobs will never be created. Countries that want industrialization and full employment (who doesn’t?) will need to do much better.

Giving up on utilities is giving up on industrialization

So, the surge in Chinese solar panel imports is definitely a good thing for lots of people who now have a better alternative to diesel generators. Some consumers will save money too.

But African countries cannot abandon utilities if they want jobs and growth. The continent’s industrialization plans require viable utilities if they are to become anything more than isolated pockets of activity. If countries want energy technology like solar to enable economic transformation, then we should all collectively be thinking about how cheap Chinese panels can best contribute to diversified national power systems as the foundation of a vibrant, expanding economy that serves everyone.

Africa needs big solar farms, not just little solar islands.

Postscript: One of the best things about working at at think tank is being surrounded by smart people with a variety of views. As I was writing this, my colleague Jeff Haeni was also analyzing the Ember data and taking down four myths. Check it out.

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I was thinking about this a lot when, on June 11, the World Bank announced an end to its ban on nuclear. The Energy for Growth Hub played a part in the Bank’s policy shift as part of a persistent and determined coalition of other think tanks, Hill staff and insiders. Why were we successful? It came down to eight steps.

Hopefully other think tanks, especially those struggling to make policy impact, glean something from this experience.

First: What are think tanks not for?

Andrew Selee has a lovely little book What Should Think Tanks Do? And Tevi Troy has a terrific essay, Devaluing the Think Tank, that I think about often, especially because Troy chronicles how some conservative organizations have been influential by patiently staying on message for decades.

Let me start by revealing my strong bias that think tanks should not exist to write academic reports no one reads. Or host meetings for egos’ sake. Or serve as a gentle pasture for retired ‘formers.’

Everything a think tank does should have a purpose. IMO, think tanks should exist for one thing and one thing only: to get policy change done.

I learned a mountain of lessons from Nancy Birdsall who built the Center for Global Development from scratch. She insisted that everyone on her team share a passion for ending global poverty, but encouraged radical experimentation of how to get there. (In an early sign of embracing apostasy, her very first big hire was Bill Easterly who had just been thrown out of the World Bank.) From Bill I learned that, if you think the status quo sucks, challenging orthodoxy is extremely useful. I’ve drawn lots of other lessons from working in some capacity in at least six other think tanks over my career, each with a niche, some focused on concrete action more than others.

When I created the Energy for Growth Hub, I tried to take this just-get-sh*t-done approach to the extreme. By design, we host almost no events and rarely attend conferences, except when the purpose is dead clear. We don’t publish long glossy reports. We’ve never held a gala. Our model is to stay in the policy trenches, largely out of sight, and be a trusted source of reliable analysis and new ideas. Our work is tailored to our micro-targeted policymaker audience, so everything written strives to be as short and jargon-free as possible.* We fail at this often (!), but we are always aspiring for brevity and clarity because that’s how to get stuff done.

*Side note for a tale that may or may not be true but has stuck with me: When Henry Kissinger was in the White House, he rejected a new staffer’s memo immediately as too long and too unclear. He rejected the next version, and the next, and the next. When the exhausted staffer finally said to him, “Sir, this is as short and clear as I can write it,” Kissinger replied, “Good. Now I’ll read it.”

So, how do think tanks make policy change happen?

Back in 2020, I wrote about the creation of the US Development Finance Corporation, which began as scrawl on Ben Leo’s napkin and is now a (soon-to-be $250 billion) federal agency at the vanguard of US foreign policy. That kind of Blue-Sky-Idea-to-Reality is rare. More often, think tanks have impact when they push for small incremental changes that can have a ripple effect, like a rule change or altering a metric or even just a neutral third party pitching a simple idea that could not be proposed by negotiators themselves.

The June 11 lifting of the World Bank’s ban on nuclear was another significant policy change where outside groups, including mine, played pivotal roles. At a recent retreat of the Hub’s board and staff, we reflected on how it happened and what lessons we might learn for other ideas we’d like to see happen, like adoption of the Modern Energy Minimum or a new global norm for power contract transparency or the launch of Energy Security Compacts.

This is far more art than science, but having a strong narrative is central to every success. Stories can convey our approach. More importantly, stories are how we learn. All stories are different. The players, the context, the climax. But they all share a common arc.

Which takes me back to the World Bank nuclear story. To explain what happened (at least from my narrow perspective) and draw lessons, here are 8 steps that describe that common arc, that story of an idea to policy change:

1. EXPLORE to find a solvable problem

Think tanks have to be on the hunt for big problems that are holding back progress. In the World Bank nuclear case, countries like Ghana were getting lots of advice from the Bank on everything from debt to infrastructure planning. But Ghana’s aspiration for a nuclear reactor to replace their gas in the mid 2030s was taboo because the World Bank had a policy to not talk about nuclear power or allow nuclear expertise to germinate inside the building (see fn 2 on page 14). Worse, the Bank’s private sector IFC put nuclear on its list of banned investments, alongside weapons and whiskey. This seemed like a problem for Ghana and other countries that might want to consider nuclear power. It also wasn’t very helpful for US nuclear developers who might want to one day export to emerging markets and would benefit from a fair playing field. So, we thought we might have found a problem to take to the next step.

2. DIG into the data

Evidence helps you figure out the extent of the problem, whether it's worth tackling, and to eventually make your case why a change may be needed. Back in 2020, we created a system to assess whether countries were taking concrete steps (not just issuing press releases) to get ready for nuclear power. The data and the first map showed very clearly that Ghana was not alone. Lots of countries who borrow from the World Bank are also serious about nuclear power. The demand was clear.

3. TEST your arguments.

I'm an introvert so this one is hard, but we have to get out there and, er, talk to people. It’s not just about being right or having a bright idea. We have to get reactions and see what sticks. We have to iterate. Did others think the Bank nuclear policy was actually a problem? (Some said yes, others no.) Why did they care? (Some wanted more energy for their countries, others wanted to box out the Russians and Chinese.) Which arguments resonated? (Poverty and climate, mostly no. Jobs and geostrategic competition, absolutely yes.) This input, over multiple years, helped our effort evolve.

4. DIVE into political tactics.

I dislike the term “theory of change,” but tactics are where we reveal our gameplan and our assumptions. Here is where we identify who we think matters, what they really care about, and who influences them most. We need to:

• Understand the target. Broad appeals to do the right thing rarely work. It’s much better to understand the dynamics inside the institutions we’re trying to impact. The World Bank is not monolithic, so we approached it at multiple levels. For example, we parsed the board members into groups that would be supportive, ambivalent, and opponents of change. We crafted outreach to each board faction and looked for opportunities to pitch different messages to each. We appealed to the World Bank president (Malpass and then Banga) or people around him. We probed for allies among the World Bank staff too (yes, we found a few). And, perhaps most importantly, we prioritized the most influential shareholder of the Bank, the US – or, more specifically, the US Treasury which controls the US seat. Our approach included direct appeals to senior Treasury officials and indirect pressure via Congress, the White House, and other executive agencies. Legislation like the International Nuclear Financing Act didn’t even need to pass, it just had to attract bipartisan support to create the intended effect.

• Understand your opponent. Who is going to block us? And how do we either flip, sideline, or bulldoze them? We learned exactly who inside the World Bank was opposed to the change and why. We opted to bide our time and, in the end, work around them.

• Constantly re-assess. People change, views change, and opportunities arise. We started poking around on the nuclear ban way back in 2018. At the time, even talking about nuclear was sensitive at the Bank and almost all of the shareholders I spoke to thought it would be impossible. Yet, over time, shifts created new allies. Japan, for instance, went from anti to ambivalent to supportive. Changes in the nuclear market also helped, such as the agreements big tech companies signed with nuclear developers, which suddenly made people think again about what might be possible. We even created an internal color-coded schematic to track our gameplan over time. And when we learned that one big objection was no money for nuclear expertise inside the Bank, we pivoted to pitch a trust fund. New allies, new problems, new solutions.

5. BUILD alliances, both on the inside and outside.

We need both. On the inside, one example was working closely with DJ Nordquist, the US rep to the World Bank board during Trump 1 who was trying to quietly crack open the door by talking with other board members about nextgen designs. Once she left office, she became an even more vocal advocate for a new nuclear policy, and then, after the 2024 election, she was back in the White House. Several Hill staff were also keen to help push, so we worked with them on multiple fronts. On the outside, we strategized with ClearPath, the highly effective center-right clean energy group, and Third Way, the center-left think tank. And we collaborated with allies at the Breakthrough Institute, such as Vijaya Ramachandran who had her own networks inside the Bank. This inside-out, left-right coalition helped to create a bipartisan effort that could talk to all parts of the Bank, all factions of Capitol Hill, and make a variety of arguments to different audiences.

6. PERSIST

Patience is a virtue. From the first discussions with World Bankers and Hill staff to the policy change was more than seven years.

7. WAIT for your moment.

Windows of opportunity arise unpredictably. To finally lift the World Bank ban, we (arguably) needed a hard-charging anti-globalist president back in the White House. The Biden team was increasingly open to nuclear for climate reasons but generally hesitant to push the Bank too hard. The Trump admin doesn't care about emissions but they want the World Bank, if the US is going to stay a member, to be open to all energy technologies. They insisted the Bank pull its head out of the sand – and do it quick.

8. LEARN

We reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and what can be applied to future ideas. After-action learning makes think tanks smarter and more effective in the future. For me, the World Bank experience underscored that we should attack problems via multiple channels and we should always treat target organizations as dynamic and responsive to changing incentives. People are dynamic and responsive too.

A final thought on what we did not do.

No long report. No big conference. No fireside chat with John Kerry. We wrote emails, sent 50+ one-pagers, harangued Hill staff, bartered for intel, drafted talking points, took discreet coffees. In the final stages, we shifted to a public tack. I wrote several Subtack posts and opeds to aid with specific policy targeting. And, out of our usual style, we produced a short video to use with certain audiences to get over last minute wobbles.

We don’t have an exact recipe to copy for our next big idea. But we have eight clear steps to try to follow. And, I think, a pretty good story to tell.

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Now, I recommend this brilliant interview with economist Moussa Blimpo, “Should countries prioritize electricity access for families or firms in Africa?” on Andrew Dabalen’s Afronomics podcast (h/t Daniel Johansson).

Here’s what I love about the episode:

Moussa knows what he’s talking about.

He’s now a prof at the University of Toronto, but when he was part of the research group of the World Bank, he wrote the seminal analysis Electricity Access in Sub-Saharan Africa: Uptake, Reliability, and Complementary Factors for Economic Impact (free PDF here.) It’s a data-rich tour de force of the issues facing Africa’s power sector.

Moussa is the exactly the kind of public intellectual we need because he mixes authority with humility.

He weaves together data and personal stories from growing up in northern Togo. The listener can feel his frustrations with the status quo, yet he also shows that he’s a kind, passionate person focused on solving real problems. By no coincidence, he’s also a longtime Fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub.

Wow (shocker!) a real debate

Andrew and Moussa have worked together, but they are not at all shy about mixing it up and enthusiastically disagreeing. This is refreshing and (sadly) too rare, especially coming out of a podcast from the staid World Bank. Love it. More of this please.

Moussa does not prevaricate: The answer is firms.

Moussa is clear and unapologetic in arguing that reliable low-cost power for industry and agriculture should be prioritized before residential connections. Here’s a taste:

“...if we are thinking about the role of electricity for job creation, is it household residential consumption and rural poor households that will create those jobs? Or is it firms in industry and transport? What will create the jobs?... It's the firms, right, that will create jobs. So it's straightforward for me…. I think [M300, the World Bank’s new initiative to connect 300 million people by 2030] should focus on providing electricity in order to create jobs and generate economic growth.”

Whether you agree or not, this is refreshing. To learn more about why he holds these views, what we are getting backwards about energy demand, why M300 could make things worse, what African leaders are missing, and much more, I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.

So here are fifteen stylized facts that I think are all true and entirely consistent with each other.

1. Electricity is good for people.

Everyone should have electricity at home, even if it starts very small. We absolutely need to deliver universal basic access as soon as possible.

2. Household connections don’t always lead to higher incomes.

People (mostly) use electricity at home for living better lives rather than earning a living. So we should not expect the sudden availability of power for lighting or a phone charger to make poor people richer. By definition, poor people won’t use much electricity because they can’t afford it – or the appliances that run on it. They might save a little bit from not having to buy kerosene and kids might be able to study at night. But we should not expect to transform livelihoods with small home power systems or with physical connections to grids that go out regularly. (And if you’re a hard-headed economist who thinks that the lack of direct short-term income impact means we therefore can’t justify investing in electricity connections, please see #1.)

3. Most electricity is not used at home.

According to IEA, only about one-quarter of the world’s electricity is residential, with the rest consumed by industry, commerce, and agriculture. The benefit of a power plant is often explained in terms of how many homes it serves because it’s easy to understand, but it’s misleading about where electrons are mostly used.

4. Electricity for business is an absolute prerequisite to job creation and economic growth.

It’s hard to imagine a modern economy without cheap consistent power. Surveys of firms across Africa consistently point to electricity as a top constraint on productivity.

5. Conversely, outages are job killers.

If your business has to regularly shut down, run on a costly generator, or keep replacing damaged equipment from voltage surges, it’s pretty hard to stay competitive and grow. The evidence of the impact on jobs is striking.

6. If we expect more energy to help people earn more money, we should target work, not home.

The feedback loop of electricity 🔁 development depends largely on boosting non-residential use. This might sound cold-hearted to people living without power at home, but in a world of limited resources, choices matter. Countries that have grown very quickly, like South Korea or China (or the US in the early 1900s) prioritized power for industry before rural homes.

7. Local politics usually mean emphasizing household connections.

Bringing electricity to new places is a common election promise. Governments, for good and less-good reasons, want to connect everyone as quickly as possible.

8. International politics are also emphasizing household connections.

If the goal is to spur prosperity and industrialization (rather than mitigate the worst effects of extreme poverty) global efforts are probably too focused on household electricity. Yes, I love Mission 300, the ambitious new World Bank & African Development Bank effort to connect 300 million people by 2030. Let’s do it. But if the push only achieves household connections without at least a parallel effort for affordable, reliable industrial power, it could wind up making the structural energy poverty problem worse. That’s because…

9. Extending the grid may be good for politics but it usually hurts the national utility.

If a utility loses money on every new customer (and nearly all African utilities do), then extending coverage means bigger losses. Compelling data from Kenya by UMass prof Jay Taneja show pretty clearly that each round of additional new customers are even poorer and use even less power – and thus the utility losses are even greater as the grid expands. So the downward financial spiral is getting worse as countries move closer to 100% access.

10. Poor reliability can push the best customers to quit the grid.

When power is unreliable, larger commercial or industrial customers have strong incentives to just build their own power sources. Kenya’s utility relies on only about 700 commercial customers for the majority of their revenue, and each one now has alternatives that are more costly but can offer better service.

11. The compounding effects of grid extension plus commercial exits are a massive squeeze on utilities.

More loss-making small customers plus the exit of its large highest-paying customers is an existential challenge for utilities.

12. Off-grid solutions are the quickest and cheapest way for initial household connections.

A grid connection is typically >US$1,000 while a solar lantern can be bought for <US$15 or a modest solar home system for $150.

13. Off-grid solutions have limited uses.

While initially cheap, small home systems don’t last very long, do not scale as consumer demand grows, and can only be used for very basic energy services. They’re great for fans and TVs. Not so much for air conditioning or heavy machinery.

14. The debate over grid vs off-grid is false.

I like to think of off-grid home systems like bicycles: they are low cost, easy to use, and super useful for getting around your neighborhood or having fun. But they won’t deliver cargo. At the same time, it’s dumb to drive an 18-wheeler semi to pick up your home groceries. Like transportation, different energy systems provide different services. People and economies need both. And for all the financial reasons above, utilities do too.

15. Finally, scale matters: If countries want to industrialize, they need industrial power.

As I type this, I’m sitting in an air-conditioned building, using the cloud, and surrounded by manufactured materials embedded with abundant energy. I take that all for granted. Everyone on earth should be able to take it for granted too.

One of my favorite graphics says it best:

The world’s largest and most influential development bank said on Wednesday it would lift its longstanding ban on funding nuclear power projects.

The decision by the board of the World Bank could have profound implications for the ability of developing countries to industrialize without burning planet-warming fuels such as coal and oil.

Here’s the full note that World Bank President Ajay Banga sent to all staff yesterday.

Embargo 414pm WBG Energy

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The relevant extract is:

What’s new is that, for the first time in decades, the World Bank Group will begin to reenter the nuclear energy space. We will advance this work in close partnership with the IAEA— building capacity and strengthening our ability to advise on non-proliferation safeguards, safety, security, and regulatory frameworks.

Together with the IAEA and other partners, we will support efforts to extend the life of existing reactors in countries that already have them, and help support grid upgrades and related infrastructure. We will also work to accelerate the potential of Small Modular Reactors—so they can become a viable option for more countries over time.

It almost didn’t happen

This policy change is personally satisfying. I started working on the World Bank ban back in 2018. It just struck me as dumb to ex ante prohibit an energy technology that was already widely in use, could deliver firm clean power at scale, and whose technology was evolving in exciting ways. The ban was utterly at odds with the mission to promote global growth and boost low carbon energy. The World Bank seemed stuck in the past.

I started talking with different World Bank shareholders about nuclear. Our first private memo on this issue started circulating in Oct 2019.

WBG Nuclear Analytical Team Proposal

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The reaction was Don’t bother. The Bank will never change.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but when we started, even talking about nuclear was considered taboo inside the World Bank. When a staffer at its private sector IFC wanted to meet me to discuss it, he had to go off campus and use his personal email. A senior advisor in one of the board member’s offices advised me to “be careful” who I raised the issue with. I even received a direct warning from a senior Bank official, passed through a friend, that I would be stopped in trying to push for an end to the ban. (👋🏽 You know who you are.) I know this all sounds nuts, but that was what we were up against.

Instead of shying away, we built a coalition of allies all pushing for openness to the technology. Lots of people helped, but I’ll especially flag friends at ClearPath and Third Way, plus a growing army of Hill staff. A big moment was the release of The World Needs More Nuclear Power: Why the World Bank Needs to Get in the Game in Foreign Affairs by DJ Nordquist and Jeff Merrifield. Nordquist had been the US rep to the World Bank under Trump 1.0 so her voice carried weight. On the inside, she had hit many of the same barriers we encountered. Nordquist managed to arrange an informal briefing for board members on new nuclear technology – a major breakthrough in itself – but had not gotten much traction on actually shifting Bank policy.

So the nuclear door had been cracked, but it really took the White House to blow it open. The Trump administration made no secret of its wishes to end the nuclear ban. I understand the final negotiations in yesterday’s board meeting were tough, especially since the US wants looser restrictions on all technologies. Banga’s note hints at it:

We don’t yet have agreement within our Board on whether the World Bank Group should engage in upstream gas—and if so, under what circumstances. This will require further discussion.

Kudos to Banga for threading the policy needle between the US and the Europeans. More negotiations are underway on gas, but the new nuclear policy is settled. This is a huge win for Banga — and for the world.

End of the ban means faster deployment and fairer export markets

The World Bank actually had two bans in place: (a) an energy policy that barred itself from building any expertise on nuclear technology that could be used to advise borrowing countries and (b) an explicit prohibition on investing in nuclear technology by its private sector lending arm, the IFC. Both of those should now be gone.

By lifting the policy ban(s), the Bank can now start to assist countries in deciding whether nuclear is appropriate for them, which models are best, how to buy them competitively, and what steps need to be taken to get ready.

I’m especially hoping that World Bank involvement will bring the nuclear market out from behind the curtain. Right now, countries that want to consider nuclear power have little choice but to turn to Russia and China for deals that are negotiated in back rooms and include multi-decade fuel lockups plus who-knows-what-else. Far better would be for open procurement in a competitive market. That’s where the Bank can really help.

Removing nuclear from the investment ban – it is literally called the IFC Exclusion List – will also open the door to other agencies that copy that list. Daniel Johansson and I counted at least 21 others. Once these organizations change too, then nuclear projects could be financed by a consortium of public and private investors. This is how big stuff gets built.

Wait, but isn’t nuclear too expensive?

I sometimes hear this from critics. A German engineer (at another international agency, not the World Bank) emailed me just a few days ago to explain that high cost is the reason to keep the ban. This is odd.

When solar was very expensive, the response was to lean in with support, subsidies, and market-building to drive down the costs. A bigger market meant more innovation and economies of scale. This is what the World Bank and others should do with nuclear as well. Banga’s note on small modular reactors (SMRs) suggests they have this in mind too.

A better criticism I heard was that SMRs – the next gen models that will (hopefully) be cheaper and more flexible – don’t actually exist yet. Sorta true. Russia and China have early operational models while multiple designs by Western firms are under active construction. FOAK is always crazy expensive. How can we get to the 10th (or 100th) SMR as quickly as possible? The World Bank can help.

Isn’t nuclear only for rich countries?

I hear this too. It’s just wrong. As my colleague Jessica Lovering wrote, India, Pakistan, and China all started nuclear programs when they were dirt poor. Poverty is no excuse for exclusion from technology — rather the opposite.

More importantly, countries can make their own choices. The NYTimes article quotes my colleague Ishmael Ackah, now an advisor to Ghana’s Energy Minister:

“Things have been slow for us because of global politics around nuclear, but we have been preparing, setting up an institutional structure, identifying sites…. We want a 24-hour economy, industrial production to be happening day and night.”

Ghana is not alone Many countries across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are taking active concrete steps to prepare for importing nuclear technology. With Hamna Tariq and Daniel Johansson, we summarize who in Africa is ready for nuclear power. Here’s the answer:

We can also answer this for South Asia and Southeast Asia .

What’s next?

Lifting the bans is just the beginning. This policy change only matters if it leads to more clean power for fast-growing economies. In the near term:

1. The World Bank must build an expert team ASAP. Fortunately, the US Congress is already ahead of the game and has introduced legislation supporting the creation of a trust fund to help. The trust fund – an idea we floated back in 2020 – is how to get things done fast inside the World Bank.

2. Other agencies should lift their bans too. I would especially keep an eye on the Asian Development Bank. It is much less beholden to the lingering anti-nuclear crowd plus its borrowers are clamoring for change. And if you care about coal plant replacement, that’s the region where nuclear could help most.

3. The US needs to move faster to deploy its first SMRs. Industry has to build its first new commercial reactors soon, which means the government has to simultaneously step up and get out of the way. The recent White House executive orders are a good signal of intent, but budget cuts at NRC and DOE might work in the opposite direction. No one said this would be easy.

So, let’s celebrate the win. But let’s get to work.

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A recent chat with my son about harm reduction strategies for opioid use disorder turned to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and it got me thinking about (what else?) energy. Maslow’s pyramid is a powerful heuristic about how our brains work, what we desire, and how our needs evolve as we make progress. Ultimately, Maslow’s idea is about what it means to be human.

A similar pyramid could help us conceptualize our energy needs. So I made this up:

If you read Eat More Electrons, you’ll know I’ve long been frustrated by the binary notion of energy access. So frustrated that I started a whole organization dedicated to dispelling the idea that energy is about a simple connection.

The debate that’s roaring right now is over what counts toward meeting the 300 million connection target of Mission 300, a big new initiative from the World Bank and the African Development Bank. The end date is 2030, so time is tight and 300 million is a huge number. It’s entirely understandable that some want to keep the definition of a connection as low as possible so the most people can be reached. At the same time, others have legitimate worries that setting the bar too low will sell poor people short.

• If an investment delivers very basic home systems that can power lights and charge a mobile phone but not much else, is that really in the spirit of energy for development?

• Or, in a world of limited resources, if we set the bar too high, we’ll probably reach fewer people and maybe even overdeliver systems to people who aren’t yet rich enough to use more power.

Maslow can help us understand the debate – and maybe point to possible solutions.

Let’s get beyond the binary

I’m a fan of the World Bank’s multi-tier framework which proposes measuring household energy access in 5 steps along different dimensions. It’s a massive improvement over the binary access rate commonly used. I wish the World Bank would use these 5 tiers much more in its own operations and not just as a theoretical construct (more on this below).

My main gripe is that the top Tier 5 is not nearly high enough. I doubt many World Bank staff would be happy with up to 3 power outages per week or be able to live on 3,000 kWh per year. But 5 tiers is definitely better than one (tiny) one.

I’m an even bigger fan of the Modern Energy Minimum which, not coincidentally, I helped to create. It’s a new metric of 1,000 kWh per person per year. The real innovation here is not just that it’s higher than other thresholds, but that it covers both electricity at home and in the wider economy. The metric proposes an annual per capita minimum of 250 kWh for residential power (equivalent to the World Bank’s Tier 4) plus an average of 750 kWh used in commerce, industry, and agriculture. Tracking both is important because we generally use electricity at home to live better lives, while we use power at work to earn a better living.

People need both. If they have power at home but not at work, they’re usually too poor to afford much electricity or the appliances that use power. This is pretty much the reason we see small or nonexistent income impacts from initial household access. The real development bang from electrification comes from boosting business and livelihoods, not home appliances.

The emphasis on residential power is understandable. We all think about our refrigerator or holiday lights more than the invisible electricity of a faraway data center or the electrons embedded in the manufacturing of all the things we use every day. We even talk about a power plant serving X thousand homes. Yet only about one-quarter of the world's electricity is residential. This ratio explains the Modern Energy Minimum’s 250/750 split too.

Moving from energy access to energy abundance

As much as I think a 1,000 kWh target is a great idea, it’s still not high enough as an end goal. The Modern Energy Minimum is intended as a helpful second step after initial access. But we actually need to go much further if we want economies to transform and people to live full lives. My adapted version of Maslow’s pyramid might help us conceptualize how.

Maslow also has me thinking about Amartya Sen. His big idea was that development is not as much about material wealth as about having choices in life. The title of his seminal Development As Freedom pretty much says it all. Maslow would, I think, agree.

It’s human to need food. But it’s also human to then yearn for security, then freedom to make choices, and even to aspire for liberation to live a life how we choose.

Energy is the same. Start with lights and aim, eventually, for a life where infinite energy liberates us to live our best selves.

I hope the chart mostly explains itself, so I’ll stop here.

What Maslow might mean for the World Bank and M300

Connections are a great goal. Let’s make as many as we can and let’s hit the 300 million target. But let’s also aim to not just get people to the first level of an initial connection, but move them up the ladder/pyramid. Let’s track not just initial connections, but each step up. Let’s set goals for new and improved connections. Let’s count people moving from zero to Tier 1, but also from 1 to 2, and so on.

The old constraint to doing this was any ability to track electricity use. That is now solved. More details to come, but Stephen Lee has cracked that problem. We can now track electricity consumption at every level of the multi-tier framework – and beyond. I hope the World Bank and its partners adopt this new approach that’s consistent with the objectives of M300 and better aligned with broader development goals.

Most of all, countries need Energy for Growth

Obviously, the push for new and improved household connections cannot be at the cost of parallel investing in energy for business. That means building systems that are low cost and reliable. That’s what industry cares about. A Nigerian entrepreneur cannot possibly succeed paying $0.30/kWh while coping with constant outages against a Vietnamese competitor paying $0.07 for power that’s 99% reliable. If this persists, Vietnam will be creating jobs and livelihoods. Nigeria will not.

For M300 and others, this requires target metrics that are not about connections. They could instead aim for measurements of lower costs and better reliability. These have some data challenges, but they are surmountable with a little effort.

I sometimes hear arguments over whether connections should come first and industry later – or the reverse. Most success stories of energy leading to economic growth and poverty reduction (in the United States, Europe, or East Asia) have largely started with industry, allowed people to become richer, and then rural electrification was only later. It’s enticing to make that argument. Focus first on industry and the connection will flow later. I might believe this sequencing makes sense, but only in a technical vacuum.

In the real world, politics make that hard. People want lights now and politicians want to get re-elected. The revolution in offgrid solar – which many people incorrectly think I disfavor – means we don’t have to choose. This post by Nithio’s Kate Steel seems right to me. Focusing on initial connections does not need to come at the cost of building reliable cheap power for business. We can walk and chew gum, rather than fight about which comes first. But we must do both.

When we’re thinking about the energy needs of the world's poor, data tracking is no longer a barrier. The main thing holding us back now is our own ambition. And our own imagination of what’s possible.

• on the intense pressures facing nonprofit leaders right now (3 min). Yep, exactly.

• Freaks Out (24 min) about the state of the world by explaining how we can keep our humanity while still getting sh*t done. Everyone I know needs this.

• shares the inside scoop over when POTUS should meet versus shun unsavory foreign leaders (11 min). I love Judd’s self-reflection and honesty about tradeoffs. We need more of this from senior policymakers.

• on why electrification requires patience (9 min). This x1000. The time horizons of academic RCTs and political election cycles are leading us astray.

• on why Africa needs Energy for Growth (20 min). Preach! 🙌 (tip: probably better with charts than audio.)

• on the battles inside both political parties over the future of energy policy (22 min). I think Ted especially nails the fight between GOP budget slashers and the Energy Dominance chestbeaters.

• on the eye-popping numbers for the mining needs of the clean energy transition (8 min). A taste: phasing out fossil fuels will require as much copper over the next 22 years as have been mined over all of human history. (tip: also better w charts.)

• Many things that seem normal today will be completely unacceptable for my grandkids. I predict two of those will be online gambling and slaughtering live animals for meat. So I enjoyed two different posts: why online gambling is bad (13 min) by & and why banning lab-grown meat is stupid (9 min) by . I couldn’t agree more. (I even went to an Upside Food party on a Miami rooftop the evening before Desantis banned the stuff in Florida.)

• And hasn’t posted yet, but she’s finally on Substack. Follow her Nuclear Power to the People.

Send me your favorites too, please.

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Jay Hammond is one of my heroes. I admire the former “Bush Rat Governor” of Alaska (1974-82) for many reasons, but most of all for being a policy pioneer. He was the main architect of the Permanent Fund Dividend which since 1982 has paid every Alaskan resident a share of the state’s oil profits. In 2024, the dividend was $1,702.

I’m thinking a lot about Governor Hammond again, especially with the election in… Suriname. Here’s why.

Why Governor Hammond was so special

I’m sad to say Jay Hammond died in 2005 and I never met the man. To be honest, I had only vaguely heard of him until I received a random email in 2011 from a Hammond family friend offering me a peek at an unfinished manuscript the former governor had been writing on how Alaska’s experience might hold lessons for Iraq. I was asked if I’d consider publishing it at the think tank where I worked. I was skeptical of course.

But once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down. Hammond was direct, laugh-out-loud funny, and refreshingly honest about his mistakes. I learned details of how his life experiences shaped his political views and the origins of his citizen-shareholder idea, which began in the tiny fishing villages of Bristol Bay and evolved to eventually become one of the great experiments in democratic governance. I loved it.

Hammond was no hippie dreaming of a socialist utopia. He was a hard-as-nails frontier Republican who thought that easy oil money made politicians lazy. So his innovation was to make people direct owners with regular dividends as a way to discipline politicians. Citizens would get a fair share plus they would be incentivized to pay attention to how their collective resources were being (mis)used. He saw the dividend as a vehicle to hold politicians accountable. As the sitting governor, he wanted to constrain himself and his successors from squandering Alaska’s oil wealth.

Hammond’s ideas were early precursors to the universal basic income movement and the wave of successful direct cash transfer programs in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and lots of other places. When the email arrived, I’d already been thinking about adapting these lessons to new oil producers in Africa to help them avoid the worst potential effects of winning the lottery.

Saving countries from their own oil

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, two of my mentors Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian had proposed Saving Iraq from Its Oil by distributing oil revenues directly to each citizen, mainly as a way to hold the country together. I found their arguments persuasive. Ghana had struck oil in 2007, so Lauren Young and I floated a similar direct cash distribution scheme to ensure that all Ghanaians benefited from the boom and not just a tiny elite.

At the time, I was frustrated by a lot of the advice to the newly-resource rich countries, which boiled down to “be like Norway” and “create strong institutions.” This was like telling insomniacs to get more sleep. True but not remotely helpful.

Norway had 150 years of democracy before striking oil. That’s one hell of a headstart. So what, in a practical nuts-and-bolts sense, could young democracies do when facing a tidal wave of sudden unearned cash?

Citizen dividends from a national windfall seemed like a very concrete way to build the incentives for stronger institutions and accountability.

• Giving people a direct benefit was good in itself.

• Igniting public interest in governance was even better.

• And perhaps the best outcome: using the dividend to establish a fair broad-based tax system to help countries thrive after the resource was gone.

I had been working on a book on the whole big idea when the Hammond manuscript landed in my lap.

I agreed to edit Hammond’s text into the core chapter of an edited volume, The Governor’s Solution: How Alaska’s Oil Dividend Could Work in Iraq and Other Oil-Rich Countries. I penned an introduction, added Nancy and Arvind’s article, plus new chapters by Scott Goldsmith on Alaska and Johnny West on Iraq. In 2013, I launched the book at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. I met many of Hammond’s original larger-than-life allies from the dividend battles, experienced the magic of Halibut Cove, and had the honor of flying to a remote cabin on Lake Clark to meet the governor's widow Bella and give her a copy.

Oil to Cash as a Big Idea

After my Alaska adventure, I finished Oil to Cash: Fighting the Resource Curse through Cash Transfers with Stephanie Majerowicz and Caroline Lambert, where we made the broader case for a citizen dividend along with design suggestions for specific countries. Although any payout would (of course) have to be tailored to each country’s context, we proposed a basic three-step model:

1. Create a transparent fund to receive revenues

2. Pay a regular universal dividend to all citizens using a simple public formula

3. Claw some portion back in taxes to establish a fair long-term tax system

We thought the economic case for Oil to Cash was strongest for Venezuela while the political case most compelling for Liberia. We also posited that new technologies in biometric ID and mobile money could keep costs low and make the entire system fully transparent and traceable. (And once a country built a national ID system and linked everyone to a digital bank account, they could not only pay dividends and collect taxes, but also have a ready-made pipeline for responding to disasters, targeting social payments to women or the poor, or replacing subsidies with cash.)

If you are already thinking of all the reasons this idea can’t possibly work, I encourage you to please skim Chapter 6 “Oil-to-Cash Won’t Work Here! Answers to Ten Common Objections” before you email me or post a comment :)

Both books were published by the Center for Global Development and, for my favorite Eat More Electrons readers, are downloadable here for free: The Governor's Solution and Oil to Cash.

Okay, but is it happening?

I enjoy writing books. But books are just not a great way to make policy change happen. It takes a lot of talking to people, learning, and adapting. Making policy ideas a reality also takes patience and luck.

We have seen some green shoots of progress.

• In Liberia, a smart young aide to President Sirleaf helped insert cash transfers as an option into its oil law. But promising early offshore exploration didn’t pan out so a Liberian oil boom never arrived.

• A version in Iraq was seriously considered by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority — and, I was told, later by Shia Sadrists — but ultimately never tried. (Apparently, neither Paul Bremer nor Muqtada al-Sadr wanted to constrain themselves.)

• Mongolia attempted a version of sharing mining revenues, but the politicians overdid it and had to dial the program back.

• Bolivia is a close example where the government uses gas revenues to fund its national pension (i.e., cash transfers for retirees).

But no country has yet fully embraced the full Oil to Cash concept.

Suriname could be the first?

Suriname is a South American country of about 600,000 people on the cusp of a massive resource boom. Last year its leader promised "Royalties for Everyone.” President Chan Santokhi explained, “every Surinamese who lives in our country receives a savings note worth US$750 with an annual interest of 7 percent. The money will be paid out in the future from the royalty income” from oil and gas starting in 2028.

Sure, the idea is a gambit to win votes. In parliamentary elections held just last Sunday, the parties of Santokhi and his chief rival Jennifer Geerlings-Simons are nearly tied, so the next president will be chosen in coming weeks by a complicated negotiation in parliament. I have no idea how it will turn out. But how to share the oil spoils is at stake.

If Suriname follows through on Royalties for All, it would give people a tangible stake in national wealth and bind the government closer to its citizens. If designed well, the plan should generate direct benefits for regular people and incentivize them to pay attention to how their government negotiates with oil companies and manages future income. It might even constrain politicians from their own worst instincts.

The stakes are higher than just one small country. Suriname’s neighbor Guyana might be next to experiment with direct dividends. I hope they try it. Lots of other countries are watching too.

Jay Hammond would approve.

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Here’s what I love:

1. Abundance makes a compelling case for (what else?) abundance. More is better. More housing, more energy, more innovation all make our lives longer, healthier, and more satisfying. Yes, more of this, please.

2. Scarcity is a choice. Supply side shortages of energy (or housing) are not an accident. They’re the predictable outcome of the accumulation of lots of small decisions, many well-meaning in isolation, like environmental impact studies. The maddening cumulative result: nothing gets done.

3. Deliberate scarcity is a political loser. No one wants anyone else taking away their favorite stuff. Making energy more expensive or banning gas stoves or mandating the end of big pickup trucks that are for many people a core part of their identity will all end in tears. Voters don’t want that.

4. We can opt for abundance. The good news: those scarcity choices can be reversed. We can build, baby, build. NIMBY can become YIMBY. Small-is-beautiful romanticism and reflexive technology favoritism can give way to all-of-the-above energy abundance. Boom!

5. They’re speaking to their own left flank. One lesson that seems obvious from the recent election is that we all could use less in-group virtue signaling and more critical reflection among our peers. Real friends criticize friends. (That’s how Charles Kenny and I have stayed close for three decades.) Klein & Thompson direct their fire at fellow liberals and environmentalists. The same dynamic applies to the right. My favorite energy podcaster Tisha Schuller is on a mission to convince oil & gas execs that they need their own Truth Bombs right now. More of all this too.

What I thought was missing from Abundance:

6. The book mostly ignores 96% of humanity. Nearly all humans live outside the United States. So nearly all the action on energy and climate is outside America’s borders too. I know the authors know this, so I would have hoped the book would have been less 🇺🇸-centric.

7. The big gains from energy abundance are in Asia and Africa, not California. Yes, we want Americans to have more, cheaper, and cleaner energy. As we electrify our economy, I would like my energy bill to go down and I could probably boost my use from ~12,000 kWh per year today to, say, maybe 15,000 kWh so I can stay cool, cook my dinner, use AI whenever I wish, and maybe charge my car without worrying too much about the environmental footprint. That would be nice. But the human welfare benefits of me using an extra 3,000 kWh of clean power are pretty much nothing compared to an extra 1,000 or 3,000 kWh for someone living in Senegal on 467 kWh today. The extra electrons let me use a fancier new stove and maybe drive an EV. A Senegalese person’s life would be utterly transformed by energy abundance. We should be trying to reap the biggest gains for human progress.

8. As are the opportunities for our government and our businesses. If energy demand growth is mostly outside our borders, so too are the windows to make the world better – or, if you prefer, to make money. Advanced nuclear is a good example. It’s a highly promising clean energy technology that is wholly consistent with an abundance ethos and can help to decarbonize the global economy. Yet I’ve been struck how often American nuclear advocates are focused on relatively small gains inside their own country (or even their own state). Yes, I know, we have to get through the domestic demonstration pilots first. But nearly all of the world’s electricity demand growth over the next several decades will be outside the US, especially in Asia.

9. Scarcity abroad is a political loser too. Governments everywhere ultimately prioritize jobs and cost of living. That’s just as true in Indonesia or Senegal as it is in California or Texas. Finger-wagging lectures about climate have been a diplomatic debacle. So the opposite — helping allies deliver energy abundance to their people — would reap major geostrategic benefits. Energy abundance is good economics and good politics.

10. Choosing scarcity is not just dumb, it’s a self-indulgence of the rich who lack self awareness of what it means to be really poor. I recall in grad school in London a (very on-brand for SOAS) debate over the surge of luxury goods like televisions in poor countries. Do poor people need TVs? Some students were adamant that it was a waste of time and money, proudly sharing that they had no telly in their flat. My professor responded, “Well, aren’t you lucky to have that choice.” That line stuck in my head years later when I did surveys with Ben Leo and Jared Kalow across a dozen African countries and found television was by far the most common aspirational appliance. Why mention this here? Because people mostly know what they want. Imposed scarcity is patronizing. Abundance is freedom.

Final thought: Is abundance having a moment… or has it already peaked?

I’m thrilled that energy abundance seems to be all the rage right now. When I launched the Energy for Growth Hub eight years ago, that was definitely not true. People asked me, in all honesty, whether putting “growth” in the org name was too provocative. Others wondered whether we were too unapologetic about embracing higher energy consumption for the world’s poor. I’d like to think the current moment is vindication that we were right to stand fast. But I’m also slightly worried that the meaning of abundance will be debated to death, misappropriated to the point of meaninglessness, or (worst of all) become a cliché.

For now, I’m going to worry less about labels and more about outcomes. The big lesson from Klein & Thompson is that we can and must take steps to build more stuff to allow people to live better, happier lives. Demand is demand. We can have a bigger positive impact on humans and the planet by enabling supply. Policy can make this easier or harder, cheaper or more expensive. We should choose easier & cheaper. In California and especially in Senegal.

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I understand the impulse. The need for energy is staggering. At least 3 billion people live without enough reliable electricity and about 750 million live without any at all. With the international aid system crumbling and populist movements on the rise globally, it’s tempting to grasp at reasons – any reasons – why politicians should keep investing in energy for the poor.

The compelling arguments for massive energy investments include creating jobs, boosting economic growth, spreading new technology, and trying to provide some credible alternative to Chinese infrastructure. Even in the Trump era, they provide plenty of justification to get our act together and invest aggressively in mutually beneficial projects.

Yet now the energy-to-stop migration argument is on the rise. For example, in a Bloomberg interview touting a new initiative to connect 300 million Africans to power by 2030,

[World Bank president] Banga said he doesn’t see the program being threatened by changes imposed by the Trump administration, including the temporary freezing of foreign-aid programs and a more inward-looking policy…. “I hope not,” he said, when asked if support for the program might ebb under the new US leadership. “It reduces illegal migration. If it keeps people happy in their countries…

Energy-to-stop-migration has also become a talking point for the Italian PM, gas company executives, and some development think tanks. Even the Biden admin included clean energy as a pillar of its aid plan for Central America to tackle “root causes” of migration.

My plea to anyone who may find this approach attractive: Please don’t. Energy as a means to keep people at home is wrong in at least three ways.

❌ Empirically wrong: Growth actually does not prevent migration.

The logic seems to be: If lack of energy is stemming job creation, then more energy and the development benefits it brings will “keep people happy” and reduce the pressure to cross borders.

The first premise has lots of evidence: yes, power outages kill jobs and, yes, all countries need abundant energy to grow richer.

But the second premise does not. My friend the brilliant economist Michael Clemens is probably the world’s leading expert on the relationship between development and migration. He concludes, based on lots and lots of empirical evidence (rather than armchair conjecture), that the opposite may even be true: for poor countries, growing incomes raise the chances of migration, not lessen it. (This starts to reverse at around $12,000 per capita.)

Think of it this way: Moving from one country to another requires a lot of upfront high-risk investment. You need money to travel, some buffer savings to get started, and some connections to move and find a job. If you are extremely poor, you can’t possibly afford any of this. But once you have more income, you can invest some of that in moving to earn even higher wages in a higher productivity economy.

Research from ODI similarly concluded:

The problem in migration policymaking – which often relies on intuition and guesswork, rather than evidence – is a scatter-gun approach which lists a whole range of issues as root causes…. Policymakers assume that addressing all of these issues will reduce people’s desire to migrate. But often, these assumptions do not hold. Through our research, we have found that reducing poverty and raising educational levels might actually increase desires to migrate, because it gives people the means to do so and broadens their horizons.

So, sorry, it’s not true. Energy-driven growth will not stem migration.

❌ Ethically wrong: Let’s not pull up the ladder that helped us and our families.

The benefits to human welfare of cross-border movement are mind-bogglingly huge. Clemens calls it the trillion dollar bill just sitting on the sidewalk waiting to be picked up. The benefits accrue not just to the individuals who move, but also to both sending and receiving countries as a whole. The inverse of this evidence is that trapping people in place is keeping everyone much poorer. So trying to prevent migration may sound good politically but it’s dumb economics.

It’s even dicier ethics. The greatest single event in my family’s history was my great grandparents moving from poor Russia to rich America. Some version of that story is true for probably 97% of today’s American citizens.

I fully understand that in the current political environment, this mountain of evidence and the related ethical arguments are not going to beat scapegoating and fear-mongering. I get that. I would not expect besieged development leaders to try to take this on right now. Talking about immigration is hard. But those making the energy-to-stop-migration argument know – or should know – that labor mobility is hugely positive. They don’t need to pander to populism with false claims.

❌ Tactically wrong: It won’t work.

Of course advocates for fighting energy poverty should always try to find ways to meet people where they are. We should frame problem solving in ways that align with their priors. But does anyone honestly believe that Trump officials will suddenly realize that, aha, they should invest in energy in poor countries so poor people stop trying to hop the border fence? Grasping at straws like this is doomed to fail.

The White House is far more likely to support overseas energy investments when they create American jobs, spread US technology, and counter China’s influence. Those are the far more promising tactical lanes – and they have the added benefit of being true.

✅ Make the case for energy abundance everywhere on the merits.

We have plenty of real reasons to justify more energy investments around the world. The economic and geostrategic self-interests are so strong they stand on their own. Most of all, the benefits of energy enable human freedom.

If the World Bank or other advocates want to appeal to the Trump administration, they need look no further than Trump’s own Secretary of Energy Chris Wright:

To me it’s just blatantly obvious that the world needs more energy, much more energy… the only goal of energy is to expand human opportunity, to make us live longer, healthier, more opportunities for us and our kids… it is foundational.

The migration justification is a trap. Let’s not fall into it.