Monitoring Uninterruptible Power Supply Equipment in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The public version of the resulting report of the effort is available here. The Democratic Republic of Congo's national electric-ity access rate is estimated at 19%. Less than 1% of the rural population and 41% of the urban population has energy access. Of the country's 10 million house-holds, only 1.6 million have have access to electricity.

Through the Electricity Access and Service Expansion project, the World Bank supports DRC's efforts to improve infrastructure governance by building the capacity of key power institutions as well as institutional and regulatory strengthening. This is a crucial step to support DRC's goal to provide electricity to 26.5 million households by 2030.

With the 2014 Electricity.1 Act, DRC expected to increase electricity access by liberalizing the power sector. However, private sector involvement in electricity access expansion is still very limited due to many deterrents, including the country's poor institutional and legal environment.

The DRC aims to connect 32% of the country to elec-tricity by 2030. Meeting this challenge will require co-ordinated efforts from various stakeholders, support-ive policies and regulations, and technical assistance support to prospective projects in order to attract in-vestments.

1 No more than 17 percent of the DRC's population has access to electricity according to household surveys reviewed for the 2019 Tracking SDG7 report, while oficial government statistics place that rate at 9 percent.

There is no interconnected national power transmis-sion network in the DRC, which is instead structured into three independent interprovincial grids. The western and southern grids are connected by a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) line. The eastern grid is more remote and will not be be connected.