Bangladesh's member-owned rural power cooperatives kept losses and theft low

Bangladesh's power grid barely reached rural areas in the 1970s; one central utility had no way to police thousands of scattered villages. In 1977 the government created the Rural Electrification Board (REB) with a different structure: electricity would be delivered through Palli Bidyut Samitis (PBS), consumer-owned rural cooperatives.

Each PBS runs a compact service area with locally hired meter readers and bill collectors, while REB provides training, procurement and oversight. Performance Target Agreements signed each year tie employee pay to results — bonuses of up to 15% of basic salary for hitting targets, pay cuts of up to 1% for missing them — and by March 2011 there were 70 PBS covering 48,746 villages.

The model performed: average PBS system loss ran about 16.62% with some cooperatives under 10%, and bill collection averaged 97% of amounts billed in 1999–2000, well above typical developing-country utilities. The World Bank's Rural Electricity Transmission and Distribution Project (2014–2021) then tested the model at scale, cutting losses in its eastern Bangladesh project area from 13% to 10.5% — below target before closing — and the ICR Review rated the outcome Highly Satisfactory.

National access climbed from 25% of the population in 2000 to 74% by 2015, and the World Bank credits REB's cooperatives with delivering electricity to more than 90 million people since 2009.