Accelerating access to energy

Nearly two billion people lack access to reliable and affordable modern energy – severely constraining their health, education and earning potential. Of this group, 60% live entirely without electricity for cooking, lighting and heating at home, for community services, or for improving the productivity of small businesses and farms.Accelerating Access to Energy outlines our 14 year journey to create and scale new decentralised energy solutions that provide safe, reliable and affordable power to low-income consumers in under-served areas.

This report outlines the lessons learned from this work. We detail the significant turning points in our strategy, identify six barriers that continue to prevent the growth and replication of promising solutions, and examine emerging opportunities to overcome these.

Why read this report?

Since 2000, Shell Foundation has worked with over 100 entrepreneurs and organisations in an effort to develop new disruptive technologies and business solutions with the potential to deliver socio-economic, health and environmental benefits at scale.

In this report, we analyse the common features of the most promising of these solutions, and the learning from failed efforts which informs our current strategy. We hope that these findings may be helpful to fellow donors, impact investors, development finance institutions, governments and corporates working hard to enhance energy access around the world today.

Download Executive Summary (pdf, 0.7MB)

Download Full Report (pdf, 7MB)