Vietnam electrified the countryside by letting locals build the grid, then merging it

In 1975 only 2.5% of Vietnamese households had electricity, and even in 1993 the World Bank put access at 14% — most rural families cooked and worked by kerosene. The first electrification efforts had reached rice fields and provincial towns, but village homes were largely bypassed, so in the 1990s Vietnam made rural households the target, pushing distribution lines from provincial capitals to districts and communes.

The trick was not to wait for one perfect grid. Agricultural cooperatives, private companies and commune electricity groups connected households with no central institutional or technical control, and 5,600 local distribution utilities (LDUs) were created as legal entities. When national funds ran out, the World Bank's Rural Energy Project (2000–06) lent US$150 million, and total rural-grid investment from 1998 to 2013 reached about US$3 billion.

Then came consolidation. EVN's power companies were allowed to take over any LDU that was not financially viable, and the local share of distribution fell from about 60% to 20%. Uniform national tariffs replaced a patchwork of local rates, with remote and poor consumers cross-subsidized, and an electricity law (2004) plus technical standards replaced the earlier laissez-faire wiring.

The numbers vindicated the order: household access rose from 2.5% in 1975 to 96% in 2009 and 99.2% in 2014, and the people served grew from 1.2 million in 1976 to about 82 million in 2009. A World Bank blog (2019) reported 99% of the population using electricity as their main lighting source, up from 14% in 1993.

Let locals build the last mile first, then merge them into one utility

Building the last mile through cooperatives and local utilities was fast because decisions sat where demand was, not in a central ministry.

Standardization came after scale: uniform tariffs and technical rules were imposed once networks existed, avoiding the paralysis of designing one perfect grid first.

EVN's power companies took over only the utilities that could not stay viable, so consolidation removed weak operators without killing local initiative.

Cross-subsidized uniform tariffs let profitable networks carry remote and poor households, keeping the expansion financially sustainable.

Let many small operators build fast where the grid cannot reach, then consolidate and standardize once demand is proven — uniformity comes later, not first.

Access kept climbing — 99.2% of households by 2014 and over 99% of the population by 2018 — and the World Bank's 2011 evaluation recorded 90% of households electrified by 2005 and nearly 94% by the end of the program period. The final phase connected roughly 10 million households at about US$500 each (1998–2013), which the energypedia review calls reasonable value given how remote those customers were. The open question is reliability: the same review warns the system may be tier 4 rather than tier 5, and EVN's power companies now run most of the network the local utilities once owned.