Financing Rural Energy Services in the Philippines: Global Environment and People-Centered Development as Public Goods

Access to energy is a means to achieve economic development. Both environmental concerns and the global privatization trends have fueled the worldwide need to develop new and renewable sources of energy such as solar, hydro, biomass and wind. In the Philippines, where these new and renewable sources of energy abound but are not yet fully exploited, the national power development through grid extension has not reached most of the country’s rural areas. Hence, a new financing scheme called Financing Energy Services for Small-scale End-users (FINESSE) has been established in the Philippines by several multilateral organizations. This paper discusses its merits and traces how it actually lends help to several rural-energy services.