A Message from the Coalition – September 2019
Our co-chairs, Steven Hunt, Senior Energy Innovation Advisor at the UK Department for International Development, and David Stonehill, Beyond the Grid Lead at Power Africa, discuss Efficiency for Access updates and accomplishments from the past year.
The past year has seen a great deal of change and progress for the Efficiency for Access Coalition. We are excited to announce that David Stonehill is joining us as Power Africa’s new representative for the Coalition. Power Africa, a US government initiative coordinated by USAID, co-chairs the Efficiency for Access Donor Roundtable along with DFID. Power Africa’s Beyond the Grid sub-initiative, now led by David, supports the private sector to deliver 30 million new off-grid connections in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, an ambitious goal directly tied to the need for improved availability of efficient, affordable, and quality-tested off-grid appliances.
Since its relaunch in January 2018, Efficiency for Access has grown into an influential and reputable platform for knowledge sharing, sector coordination and awareness raising. In the past year alone, six new Donor Roundtable members have joined the Coalition, including ESMAP, DOEN Foundation, Acumen, USAID, and Clinton Health Access Initiative. Today, the 14 organisations comprising the Efficiency for Access Coalition have programmes and initiatives spanning three continents, 44 countries, and 22 technologies.
This March, ten of our members convened in London for the first annual Efficiency for Access Coalition in-person meeting, which was organized alongside the UK Department for International Development’s Transforming Energy Access: Innovations towards SDG 7 event. This gathering allowed members to come to an understanding of shared goals, identify joint priority areas, and weigh in on Efficiency for Access’s new and improved Theory of Change.
Beyond the Donor Roundtable, this year also saw the establishment of a number of ancillary groups intended to broaden the reach and impact of the Efficiency for Access ecosystem:
- Efficiency for Access Investor Network: Acumen’s contribution to the Coalition, brings together 37 leading financiers from 24 organisations seeking market intelligence and an investable pipeline to make their first investments in productive use companies.
- Efficiency for Access Programme Partners: Consisting of programmatic and amplifying media partners that extend the Coalition’s reach across the energy access sector. Our partners include GOGLA, energypedia, Rocky Mountain Institute, Energy 4 Impact, Power for All, Sun-Connect News, Modern Energy Cooking Services, and Engineers without Borders UK.
Our Coalition members and partners have played a significant role in the success of our two multi-month communications campaigns on agricultural technologies and cooling this year. We look forward to continuing this collective awareness-raising effort through our upcoming campaign on gender and broader inclusivity in the appliance energy efficiency space, which launches in November.
In recent months, Efficiency for Access and our partners have also published a number of exciting new research outputs intended to empower clean energy access stakeholders with efficient appliance consumer, technical, and market intelligence. These include a collaborative research effort with GOGLA and the World Bank Group on the semi-annual Global Off-grid Solar Market Report; Equip Data, an independent tool that shares key performance and quality data for over 250 off-grid appliances; a first-ever policy brief; and technical roadmaps for solar water pump and refrigerationtechnologies. This year, the Coalition also released the first round of funding from its new Research & Development Fund. With support from UK aid, the Fund will provide £1.05 million to nine organisations conducting innovative research on highly efficient appliances which can reach populations in developing countries not served by the grid.
This week, we are particularly excited to announce the launch of our newest report, Solar Water Pump Outlook 2019: Global Trends and Market Opportunities. The report explores major market trends for solar water pumps in India and sub-Saharan Africa and seeks to mobilize investment and policy support into the sector to accelerate growth. The report complements another recent analysis published by IFC Lighting Global, an Efficiency for Access Coalition member: Productive Use Leveraging Solar Energy. This set of reports represents just one of the ways in which Efficiency for Access is working to promote synergies and cohesion among our Coalition members and partners.
The growth and success of the Efficiency for Access ecosystem over the past year reflects the growing recognition of the opportunity of energy efficient appliances to accelerate universal energy access. We look forward to working with partners and to more positive progress in the coming year.