The road from the port at Cap-Haïtien to the inland town of Marchand-Dessalines covers just 80 miles. On a good day in most countries, that's a 90-minute drive. In Haiti, it takes four hours—over dirt roads and the occasional flash of turquoise sea, through stretches where gang activity has made the route notorious.

Wislet Pierre Jean makes the trip anyway. He runs logistics for Alina Enèji , a Haitian energy company, and his truck usually has solar panels strapped to the roof, headed for homes that have never had power. "This doesn't stop us from reaching the communities who need electricity," he says. About 40% of Haiti's population lives in such rural areas.

That encapsulates the story of Haiti's electricity sector right now. A country that shows up in headlines mostly for political collapse and gang warfare is also—quietly and verifiably—building out a new way to deliver power to the people that the conventional grid was never going to reach. The goal is to roughly double Haiti's electrification rate to 60% of the population. This solution is real, and it's working better than most people outside the country assume.

"Most of the time, people think that nothing is happening in Haiti," Dr. Evenson Calixte, who runs the country's energy regulatory authority, ANARSE, told me. "Even though we are in a very difficult situation, Haiti is making progress."

The numbers back him up, with caveats. Calixte puts national electrification at around 35%. But the energy regulator is quick to note that having "reliable access" is a different matter. In the rural and poor urban areas, only about 10% have access; the rest get power a few hours a day, if that, from generators running on diesel or heavy fuel oil.

The government's energy roadmap, which runs through 2032, aims to roughly double overall access to 60% within the next five years. That's an ambitious target for a country where, as Calixte put it, conventional grid extension "will not be sufficient" to reach communities scattered across mountains and floodplains with no roads to speak of.

The 'Mesh Grid' Is A Key Tool

The tool getting some of the credit for narrowing that gap is something most people have never heard of: the mesh grid. It's a hybrid technology that sits between a single household's rooftop solar panel and a full mini-grid serving a town or complex. It costs about 40% less than most electric systems, not to mention that battery and solar panel prices are down 80%.

A handful of homes—anywhere from three to a dozen—share power generated and stored locally, with smart meters ensuring everyone pays only for what they use. No land purchase, no village-wide permitting fight, no waiting twelve to eighteen months for a mini-grid to come online. Installation crews can be trained locally, and if one node fails, it doesn't take down the whole system the way an outage on a larger grid would.

Alina Enèji, the company Pierre Jean works for, had just 35 of these connections in Marchand-Dessalines in 2021. Now that the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet is involved—a philanthropic outfit founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund—it shot to 1,000 in 2023.

"We were so small we couldn't get the conversations started," said Alina Enèji's founder, Driko Ducasse, of trying to raise capital at that stage.

That's where the financing story gets interesting, and it's a model worth paying attention to beyond Haiti. The Alliance didn't try to fund the whole buildout. It covered roughly 20% to 30% of system costs—enough of a subsidy to get installations moving.

"That's the perfect role for a philanthropy," Isa Beltran, the Alliance's vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean, told me. "You come in when it's very early and very risky, put some money in, and it's not so small or so risky anymore, and someone else can continue to add funding on top of that."

In this case, "someone else" turned out to be the World Bank, which put in a $1.7 million loan, and IDB Lab, the Inter-American Development Bank's innovation arm, which added a $1.8 million grant—unlocking $3.5 million in follow-on financing. Within 18 months, connections had jumped from 1,000 to more than 5,000 households across 48 villages, reaching an estimated 21,000 people, with a clear runway to 10,000 by the end of this year and 25,000 beyond that.

Humanitarian Relief Or Infrastructure Development?

It's worth asking whether a few thousand rooftop connections are a meaningful answer in a country of nearly 12 million people. Most philanthropic dollars flowing into Haiti go toward humanitarian relief rather than infrastructure.

"I recognize that it's complex to work in Haiti," says Beltran. The risks include instability, weak institutions, and a 19th-century "independence debt" to France that drained the country's resources for generations.

But the counterargument isn't sentiment; it's the scoreboard. A technology that connected 35 households five years ago is now connected to 5,000 households and headed toward 25,000, at roughly a third of the cost per connection of a conventional mini-grid—with annual operating costs of just $10 to $20 per connection.

The pilot got written into Haiti's national Horizon 2050 electrification plan. And the lessons learned in Haiti's mountains are incorporated into a $750 million World Bank-backed program in Nigeria, where Okra Solar—the same mesh-grid technology provider—is working with the country's Rural Electrification Agency to reach 100,000 homes. "We made it work in Haiti," Beltran says, "so there's very little excuse to not do it somewhere else."

The theme holds: Haiti still has major problems, and no one involved in this work claims otherwise. Poverty persists, and fuel shortages make life hard. Gangs have stolen solar panels from trucks and cut meter cables. Most households connected to mesh grids still cook with charcoal and firewood.

But in a country where the prevailing global narrative is paralysis and poverty, a small Haitian company and a coalition of regulators, development banks, and philanthropic funders have built something that demonstrably works—more reliable electricity, which allows people to access the basics to run any society.

"Haiti is facing a very difficult political and security situation. We should not minimize that reality," says the country's head energy regulator, Calixte. "We are working with partners to deploy decentralized solutions such as mesh grids, and we are seeing they can work. I think this is a very important signal for investors."

Whether Haiti reaches 60% electrification by the early 2030s will depend on securing financing and on ensuring that the security situation improves. Still, the mesh grids spreading across Haiti's countryside prove that the country's energy story may transcend the privation. Indeed, it’s a bright spot—one in which the people have found a way to turn on the lights.

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