Blackout or Blanked Out ? Monitoring the Quality of Electricity Service in Developing Countries

Access to reliable electricity is a Sustainable Development Goal, and key for both economicgrowth and individual wellbeing. Yet, in the absence of sophisticated monitoring systems, policy makers indeveloping countries commonly rely on surveys to measure electricity reliability and prioritize investments. Theaccuracy of such survey-based methods is unclear. This study built a low-cost national electricity outage monitoringnetwork, using off-the-shelf components in Tajikistan – a country with severe electricity service constraints. Thesystem was introduced alongside a monthly household survey called Listening to Tajikistan, which allowed benchmarkingthe survey summary statistics against unbiased measures. The results show that although the two measures were wellcorrelated, the survey data suffered from significant and systematic bias. Survey respondents (i) systematicallyunderreported the incidence and severity of electricity outages on average, but (ii) systematically overreported theincidence of outages during a period of abnormally widespread service disruption of long duration. Thesefindings suggest that bias in survey-based measures is sensitive to the salience of outages to the respondent, andthat, where feasible, automated electricity monitoring can provide more accurate quality measurement. For surveysettings, the results also suggest that estimates are more accurate over short (daily) reference periods.