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About Us

Shell Foundation (SF) is a charity registered in England and Wales, founded by Shell in 2000, that creates and scales business solutions that empower underserved populations to earn a living income through access to clean energy products and services.

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Our Approach

Shell Foundation seek to deploy our resources in three ways to encourage innovation and scale:

  • We support early-stage technology and business innovations that enhance income by generating greater value for customers and improving affordability.
  • We work with sector actors – specialist intermediaries to facilitate growth and replication at an industry level, or large corporate partners already serving millions of our target customer groups – to maximise the scale and speed of energy access solutions reaching our target customers.
  • We use our expertise and experience to present the investment case in energy access solutions, our concessional capital to de-risk opportunities and unlock commercial funding, and our understanding of markets and business to develop and scale new and appropriate financing mechanisms.
See our Customer Focus

OUR COMMITMENT TO DE&I

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is embedded in how we work and how we design programmes to meet the needs of women and other customer groups that are harder to reach.

We have clear DE&I commitments that define activity across the organisation, including but not limited to: investment criteria, resource allocation, design of programmes, portfolio and partnerships, who we work with and what we track and measure.

Visit our Gender page

OUR INDEPENDENCE FROM SHELL

Our  independence is key to our ability to work across public and private sectors to deliver our charitable objectives.

We deploy the full range of resources at our disposal: the knowledge, experience and skills of our staff, funds, networks, and our ability to leverage value-adding support as we deem appropriate from others.

In line with our mission and charitable independence, Shell Foundation decides what issues to tackle, in which countries, with which partners, as well as if and when to draw on our links to Shell in ways that we believe will achieve large-scale development outcomes for Shell Foundation’s target beneficiaries.

Our independence is maintained through:

  • A mixed board of trustees, including a majority of leading figures from sectors relevant to international development, an independent Chair and senior Shell executives;
  • Financial independence, achieved through management of an endowment, governed by the board of trustees, to fund our operations;
  • A set of business principles to which our staff, board and partners are held accountable, that includes a commitment to protect our independence and is supported by a robust control framework to ensure these principles are followed;
  • Regular reports that assess our performance against pre-defined impact targets and milestones
  • Transparent protocols to govern how and when we are able to leverage support from Shell in support of our charitable goals, and prohibits us from working for their benefit except as is incidental to our charitable purpose.