Research & Development
CommUnity Energy insights Framework
(CUE-F)
Bridging Community Realities in Energy Planning
What makes a community ready for a mini-grid - and how would you know early enough to act on it?
Community conditions shape whether mini-grids succeed long-term. Governance structures, livelihood patterns, the capacity to maintain a system, the ability and willingness to pay - these dimensions consistently determine whether energy projects survive. But they rarely make it into planning in a structured, usable way.
CUE-F is an open-access framework developed by ENACT that translates community conditions into a structured readiness profile across nine dimensions: governance, O&M capacity, ability to pay, market access, community assets, energy use, anchor loads, policy and regulatory environment, and physical environment.
A community that understands its own readiness profile is better positioned for investment. A developer who uses that profile makes better decisions.
HOW IT WORKS
CUE-F assesses community readiness across nine pillars, each weighted based on what the evidence shows predicts long-term project sustainability. Governance carries the highest weight - because strong community governance is one of the most reliable predictors of whether an energy system survives, independent of income level or infrastructure.
The framework produces a profile, not just a score. The per-pillar breakdown is where the actionable information sits - identifying not whether to invest, but what a community needs to be investment-ready and what a developer needs to address in project design.
The framework can be used by:
Developers and practitioners doing pre-investment community assessment
Funders seeking structured, community-side evidence to inform risk assessment and investment decisions
Communities to understand where they stand and what to work toward
Try it
We are actively looking for practitioner feedback. Does it capture what you actually need to know?
Try it on a project you know and tell us where it works and where it falls short - your input directly shapes the next iteration.
Explore the framework
and give feedback on the pillars
Apply it to a community you know
About this project
CUE-F was developed by ENACT through the CUE-F/CUE-I project with support from Imaginal Seeds. It was developed based on ENACT's field experience across nine countries (covering East Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia), a systematic review of existing sector tools and literature, and practitioner engagement across Southeast Asia and Africa.
The framework was piloted in Kampung Cincin, Pahang, Malaysia and tested with practitioners working with community-managed mini-grids in Southeast Asia.