EnergyAgricultureFinancial Inclusion

60 Decibels
Off-Grid Energy Benchmarks

Last Updated: February 2024
> What are 60 Decibels Benchmarks?
60 Decibels has collected impact data since 2015. Over the years, we’ve conducted 361,000+ interviews in 70 countries, with customers of 900+ organizations through 1,651 Lean Data projects across multiple sectors: energy, agriculture, financial inclusion, health, education, and more. By asking the same questions across multiple projects, we’ve been able to develop benchmarks.

These benchmarks are the median performance of all our projects, providing context and insights on sector, portfolio, and organization impact and areas for focus. Going a step further, ranking gives insight into the range of performance. We can turn this into actionable recommendations by identifying what practices, business models, and more, the highest-performing organizations employ.
This is a benchmark of the performance of 137 energy organizations, across 29 countries, from 210 Lean Data projects, listening to over 39,000 customers.
This includes companies and organizations providing solar home system, solar lantern, mini-grid connections, and cooking products and services, with data for the past 3 years. We’ll periodically update this page, so you can always find the latest sector trends here.
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> Introducing the 60 Decibels Off-Grid Energy Benchmarks
Here you can explore the benchmarks and results for our off-grid energy database. This includes organizations providing solar home systems, mini-grid connections, solar lanterns, improved cookstoves, appliances such as solar TVs, fans, solar water pumps, and off-grid refrigerators, and other innovations such as smart metering, financing for energy, and more. We’ll keep this page updated every month so you can always find the latest sector trends here.
> 60dB Benchmark Quintiles
Benchmarking is not just about hitting the average – the goal is to become a top performer. To make ‘impact performance’ as tangible as possible, we include the range of impact performance for each benchmark. This provides transparency about the variability of impact performance for each metric, allowing organizations and funds to track their impact over time.
> The Charts
We’ve analysed the data in different ways so you can find a view that best suits your needs. You can filter by sub-sector, explore who is in the Benchmark, and hover over elements of the charts – we’ve put indicator definitions, minimum and maximum values, quintile values, and other information there for you too. Have a go and let us know what you think!
> Performance by Organization
We rank all the Lean Data projects in our database. Only projects in the last 3 years are included – we’ll likely move the cut-off to 2 years soon. Each ‘project’ is unique by organization, product type, and country. The latest data is used.
> Why Off-Grid Energy Matters Report
In case you missed it, you can find out more about our work, our benchmarking, the Impact Index, and additional insights in our flagship 2020 Why Off-grid Energy Matters report.

If you have any questions, reach out to Kat Harrison, our Director at 60 Decibels who leads our energy work.