Rwanda is a small landlocked East African country with a green, mountainous landscape of 26,338 km2 in area with a population of 12.2 million in 2017. The capital is Kigali and the official languages are English and French.

The economy is based mostly on subsistence agriculture by local farmers.  Despite Rwanda's fertile ecosystem, food production often does not keep pace with population growth, and food imports are required. Subsistence crops grown in the country include matoke (green bananas), which occupy more than a third of the country’s farmland, potatoes, beans, sweet potatoes, cassava, wheat and maize. Coffee and tea are the major cash crops for export. In spite of the marked progress in the decade to 2012, economic growth in Rwanda is mostly driven by expenditures related to large aid flows, heavy public investments and agricultural production

Rwanda‘s energy balance shows that about 85% of its overall primary energy consumption is based on biomass (99% of all households use biomass for cooking), 11% from petroleum products (transport, electricity generation and industrial use) and 4% from hydro sources for electricity. Rwanda has a variety of potential energy resources from biomass, hydro, solar, petroleum, methane gas, wind and geothermal.

Rwanda has a good solar energy potential, where the daily insolation is ranging from 4 to 5 kWh/m2 . This energy potential is used as a source of electricity to rural institutions located at far distances (greater than 5km) from the national interconnected grid through reliable off-grid systems.

The Government of Rwanda recognizes the vital role that electricity access plays in accelerating economic development through improving health and standards of living. Energy and particularly access to electricity is the Government’s key priority. This is why significant investments have been made and progress registered led to over 24% of households getting access to electricity. More efforts need to be made for the Government to achieve the set targets of 70% by 2017/18 and 100% by 2020. The scope of standalone solar systems and mini-grids technologies have been considered to be used in Rwanda to rapidly scale up electricity access