Turning the Lights on in Haiti
As civil conflict in Haiti intensified last year, and after years of continued instability and lack of investment, the country’s power infrastructure has steadily decayed, leaving millions in the dark. In a country of 11.7 million people where the grid serves only 2% of the rural population, kerosene lamps and pricey diesel generators are the main alternative, driving households to look for alternative ways to keep the lights on. Solar mesh grids offered the perfect innovation to do just that.
These modular, solar-powered systems link households and businesses in a shared micro-network — portable enough to reach communities with limited road access, and resilient enough to keep running when traditional grids cannot. As a result, whenever Haiti's central grid faltered, mesh grids maintained affordable service in rural areas.
Alina Enèji, a Haitian-led startup, has been installing mesh grid systems across the country's Nord and Artibonite regions since 2021. Support from the Global Energy Alliance and the Off-Grid Electricity Fund helped the company grow from 35 household connections to over 5,000 — reaching about 21,000 people — by late 2025. Building on that success, and in partnership with the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the IDB Lab, the program is scaling up to reach 25,000 households, enabling expansion at roughly one-third the cost of traditional mini-grids.
Stability is just the start. Users are leveraging their mesh grids to launch or expand income-generating activities — from refrigeration to phone-charging services — showing how, even in unstable environments, frontier technology can be a catalyst for opportunity.
This is an extremely tough environment to operate in. Proving a model in Haiti would provide a blueprint for electrifying hard-to-reach communities in challenging operating environments and fragile markets across the world.