The purpose of this Energy Insight paper is to describe some of the challenges faced in delivering universal access to electricity in Sierra Leone and to describe how EEG has gone about designing a programme of research aimed at helping to address some of those challenges. The Sierra Leone programme is EEG’s first attempt to deliver a programme of research that is specifically tied to potential research problems identified by sector stakeholders themselves, as a means of developing a body of research that will be of direct use to policymakers.