Organic-inorganic hybrid solar cells that combine a mesoporous scaffold, a perovskite light absorber and an organic hole transporter have emerged at the forefront of solution-processable photovoltaic devices; however, they require processing temperatures of up to 500 °C to sinter the mesoporous metal-oxide support. Here, we report the use of a thin film of ZnO nanoparticles as an electron-transport layer in CH3 NH3 PbI3 -based solar cells; in contrast to mesoporous TiO2 , the ZnO layer is both substantially thinner and requires no sintering. We took advantage of these facts to prepare flexible solar cells with power-conversion efficiencies in excess of 10%. The use of ZnO also results in improvements to device performance for cells prepared on rigid substrates. Solar cells based on this design exhibit power-conversion efficiencies as high as 15.7% when measured under AM1.5G illumination, which makes them some of the highest-performing perovskite solar cells reported to date.