To date, minigrids and decentralised utilities are reaching only a fraction of a percent (0.2%) of households with energy access in sub-Saharan Africa. In the first of a series of reports on the potential of decentralised utilities to bring in a new era in energy access, this SF report looks at the last ten years…
Shell Foundation and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, London have collaborated on a report exploring energy storage solutions for off-grid organisations, looking at new technologies, challenges and opportunities. The report presents outcome from a series of interviews with SF portfolio enterprises, and explores storage options for a number of uses: Picosolar Solar home systems…
The Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) sector will be a critical component of reaching SDG7 – and requires appropriately-funded commercial enterprises to open entire new consumer markets. In this new report, SF and Persistent present learnings from their experience in venture building PAYG companies in multiple African markets, including a case study from SolarWorks! in Mozambique, where 20…
Results Based Financing (RBF) programmes have attempted in the past to provide funding for minigrids, but many of them have struggled to disburse the funding effectively. African Minigrid Developers Association’s (AMDA’s) members have participated in many of these programmes and collated their experience of what has worked and what has not worked into a policy…
The Democratic Republic of Congo represents one of the most challenging frontier markets to work in, with no or poor access to energy. In August 2017, we supported UK company Bboxx, alongside the UK Government, USAID and Power Africa, to pilot their off grid solution in the city of Goma, on the eastern border of the…
Read the business first approach report on gender inclusion (PDF 25.1MB).
SF’s partnership with Open Capital Advisors is helping off-grid enterprises in Uganda access local debt finance, public partnerships to serve low-income households and international support to enhance energy for productive use. Download the 2018 market map (PDF 1.2MB).
Decentralised renewable power generation and distribution systems such as mini-grids, are important tools for providing power to the roughly 600 million Africans currently living without access to modern energy services. For African Governments to meet the Sustainable Energy for All Goal of Universal Access to Energy By 2030, it is estimated that 40 percent of…
By Charlie Nichols and Samir Ibrahim, Co-Founders of SunCulture Four out of five African families depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, yet just four percent use irrigation with the rest relying on increasingly unreliable rainfall. We know that switching to irrigated agriculture can increase yields by up to 90 percent when compared to nearby rain-fed…
SF is working with Value for Women to present the business case of gender inclusion strategies for SMEs in the off-grid energy sector. The lessons emerging, based on the first 11 months of testing approaches of SF’s portfolio of enterprises explore the potential impact to businesses, including: How SMEs can integrate and adopt gender inclusion…