Aid on Spreadsheets

Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa - Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa - Liberia

The Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa (BGFA) is a planned expansion and scale up of an innovative, results-based initiative incentivising private sector to provide affordable, efficient, high quality, renewable energy services to underserved people in off-grid rural and peri-urban areas that builds on experience of the Beyond the Grid Fund for Zambia. Sida's proposed support to BGFA includes, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Mozambique and Zambia. BGFA aims to reach 5-15 million people with clean, renewable and reliable energy services. BGFA is designed to stimulate and accelerate the emergence of new business models for provision of affordable energy access at scale whilst demonstrating sustainability over time. The BGFA particularly supports the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), which aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy access for all by 2030. BGFA is a tailored, results-based incentive scheme for private sector early movers in risky frontier markets that are targeting underserved market segments. BGFA uses a tailored tender process (Social Impact Procurement) to “procure” modern energy services that are currently not sufficiently profitable for purely commercial activity. BGFA works in parallel to improve market ecosystem conditions, utilising a combination of capacity building and technical assistance, stakeholder outreach and market intelligence development, in a “Platform for Change” approach. In addition, BGFA combines detailed market analysis with data and information on from a monitoring and evaluation framework, yielding valuable insights and metrics on “frontier” markets and end-customer preferences. This information is utilised to help market stakeholders increase quality of energy services delivered to end customers, and improve investment and other development-related decision making (e.g. from banks, credit institutions and other investors) and delivered to the market via the Platform for Change. Based on previous results in Zambia, BGFA is expected to mobilise private resources of around 3-4 times the Swedish support. The Swedish support is designed to cover part of the risk margin for scaling and growing sustainable businesses. The main share of the companies financing will come from their operations - delivery of high quality energy services at affordable costs to consumers at the bottom of the pyramid. The BGFA will be managed by the Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (NEFCO), a Public Financial Institution, focused on environmental investments, established by the Nordic Governments in 1990. NEFCO provides results-based green financing. BGFA will be managed by NEFCO in partnership with the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), an Austria-based international multilateral partnership, working to accelerate market-based deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Project ID

SE-0-SE-6-12534A0103-LBR-23210

Activity status

1 - Pipeline/identification

Aid type

B03 - Contributions to specific-purpose programmes and funds managed by international organisations (multilateral, INGO)

% to Liberia

100.00

Organisations

Funding

Sweden

Extending

Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency

Implementing

Other multilateral institution

CRS code	%
Unknown (0)	100.0