What the new World Bank scorecard gets right about income poverty – and less right about energy poverty

Back to your regularly scheduled energy nerd content

The scrappy journalists at Devex caught my eye with their story about the World Bank simplifying its own performance scorecard from 150 indicators to just 22. Naturally, I jumped to see what they are tracking for energy and… was both pleasantly surprised and disappointed. 

Who cares about the World Bank?

Early in my career, I worked at the World Bank for then-Africa VP Callisto Madavo and chief economist Alan Gelb, where I learned a ton (and probably contributed very little). I love the World Bank because it’s exactly the type of global institution we need to drive more capital to poor countries, grow our collective knowledge about the messy development process, and aggregate data about how we’re doing. At the same time, I’m consistently frustrated by the Bank because it’s too often focused on itself rather than clients, never admits mistakes no matter how obvious, and is always announcing big new initiatives with little honest reflection on what’s worked or not in the past.

A clear scorecard with a few trackable indicators could be exactly what a big behemoth like the World Bank needs. 

The income ladder is great

The new scorecard starts strong, by explaining that it tracks progress against income poverty at least 3 ways: 

• people at $2.15 per day

• people at $6.85 per day

• A new “prosperity gap” measuring the distance from $25 per day

This is awesome because the data is based on robust regular surveys and follows progress at multiple steps up the income ladder, not just the very extreme poor. This is all reflective of how people lift themselves up from poverty into the middle class, and then (ideally) become even wealthier. (Although even $25 per day is still less than $10,000 per year. I doubt many of my readers would be happy on that salary!) Nevertheless, this ladder approach also means the World Bank stays relevant in countries that have largely eliminated the most extreme poverty but still have so much development progress yet to go. 

The energy ladder is getting better…

The scorecard’s energy section lists a country’s access rate (defined, sigh, as “the primary source of lighting is provided by the local electricity provider, solar systems, mini-grids, or stand-alone systems”) only as “client context” and not – as I feared – the main indicator. The World Bank is itself tracking its contribution, per the methodology note, via:

• Direct new access provided by connections from Bank projects 

• Inferred new access modeled on estimated connections from Bank projects

• Improved access modeled on estimates of boosted residential consumption

The first two are fine IMO. The third is more interesting because it gives the Bank credit for “improved” service to a household if they jump from one consumption tier to the next, based on the Bank’s 5-level “multi tier framework.” I love the MTF conceptually. Its shortcoming has been that it’s far too expensive to track regularly to make it a usable progress metric. The Bank seems to have landed on a model that can estimate households jumping from one tier to the next. (I’ve reread the methodology three times and I’m not sure I understand exactly how they calculate this, but the concept is still great.) So a family at Tier 3 using 1 kWh/day that jumps to 4 kWh/day would count as improved service. I agree wholeheartedly with that. 

Source: methodology note

… and getting closer to the Modern Energy Minimum

If you read my stuff, you’ll know I’ve been pushing for a simpler way to do this: just track people’s energy consumption at different thresholds, like we do for income. So just as we have income poverty headcounts at $2.15 and $6.85, why not do the same for electricity? Colleagues and I have suggested a 1000 kWh per person per year “Modern Energy Minimum” as the second step – which coincidentally correlates almost perfectly with $6.85 per day in income. Our proposal is that reaching the new Minimum would mean consuming at least 300 kWh at home and 700 kWh in the wider economy. The MTF’s Tier 4 (1250 kWh per household or about 250 kWh per person) is pretty close. And I think we’ll soon have a new way to estimate consumption patterns that could complement and strengthen the Bank’s model by using high resolution satellite imagery and machine learning.

But non-residential energy is still missing

My biggest disappointment about the Bank’s approach is the narrow focus on only residential electricity. Yes, we all need modern energy at home to live better lives. But we earn money and get richer by using energy mostly outside the home. In fact, about 70% of global electricity is used in commercial buildings, industry, farms, and increasingly in data centers (which is why the MEM is a 30/70 split). Only tracking basic household electricity as a metric for modern energy is like only tracking basic literacy as a metric for an educated workforce. 

That’s also why the Modern Energy Minimum might be a useful metric for the World Bank to adopt since it also covers each country’s per capita non-residential electricity use. Modern energy is both. Let’s track both. 

And a few smaller gripes about the World Bank scorecard

The scorecard is clearly intended to give the Bank’s many audiences a better sense of what the organization is up to and how it's doing. So the data and terminology should be plainly understandable and not confusing. Yet… 

1. What’s the timing? The Bank says it’s already achieved 100 million new or improved connections so far and is expecting 315 million. By when exactly? A buried footnote explains that the expected results are for the life of the underlying projects. Clear as mud. 

2. So many acronyms. Extreme institutional navel-gazing here. The latest scorecard release uses the term FCV 28 times but never explains that it means countries experiencing “Fragility, Conflict & Violence” or what that actually entails. Google can help a reader translate the acronym but not the actual meaning. If the average New York Times reader could not understand this, it’s a comms fail. 

3. Misleading charts. Figures should help readers understand data better, not create confusion. Have a look at this chart on the scorecard web page and tell me how far along is progress in AFE (Africa East) or AFW (Africa West)?  

Looks like they’re almost done, right? Eyeball looks like maybe 80% or 85% toward the expected goal? Actually, they’re only at 30% (36m vs a goal of 120m) for AFE and just 25% for AFW (18m vs 72m). I’m sure they picked a log scale y-axis for a reason, but it’s decidedly unhelpful here for clearly conveying what’s ahead.  

4. Smiling children again!?! A chronic pet peeve of mine in development is cliché imagery. Elephants, acacia trees, and smiling children are top of the list. And what’s the opening slide of the new data scorecard? 

Boo 👎