Are “accessible” and “sustainable” the same thing?

Note: This is part 8 of 8 field notes from a solar home system assessment my team conducted in remote communities in Palawan. Details that could identify the service provider and specific project have been redacted to protect the integrity of the work. The observations and reflections here are my own.

Somewhere between the first barangay and the last, I started sitting with a question I couldn’t quite shake. Initiatives like this solar home system program do something real—they bring light to households that had none, at a monthly fee that makes access possible without a high upfront cost. And yet. The longer I spoke with the people benefiting from the service, the more I found myself wondering whether ‘accessible’ and ‘sustainable’ are actually the same thing.

The dissatisfaction my teammates and I encountered wasn’t random. It had a pattern. The longer someone had been subscribed, the more likely they were to start doing the math—comparing what they’d paid in total to what it would have cost to simply own a system outright. At some point, the monthly fee stops feeling like access and starts feeling like a permanent arrangement with no exit. That’s when the frustration sets in.

And yet I keep returning to something the data doesn’t easily show. Three or four years ago, when these same households first subscribed, most couldn’t afford the upfront cost of owning a solar home system outright. The monthly fee wasn’t just convenient—it was the only door open to them. What looks like an unfavorable comparison now only looks that way because the program worked. It gave them three years of reliable light, of charged phones, of evenings that didn’t end at sundown. That’s not nothing. Maybe that’s not nothing at all.

I don’t think this program is a failure. I don’t think it’s a complete solution either. Perhaps the most honest thing I can say after all of these conversations is that energy poverty is complicated in ways that no single initiative—however well-designed—could ever fix on its own. The people I met deserved more than a band-aid. They also deserved the band-aid when the wound was open and nothing else was available. I’m still thinking about how to hold both of those things at once.