South-South Clean Energy Forum 2026
First expert convening on clean energy appliances in agricultural value chains, with a focus on cold storages.
Hyatt Regency Delhi | 4th June 2026
Solar-powered tools are helping farmers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America grow more, waste less, and earn more. The South South Clean Energy Forum brings together the people building, funding, and governing these solutions — to share what works and agree on how to scale it.
The scale of the opportunity
Access to electricity is opening new possibilities for farmers and rural businesses across the Global South. But electricity alone does not transform livelihoods. Real impact happens when people can use that energy productively, to irrigate crops, preserve food, process goods, and grow businesses.
This is where technologies such as solar-powered irrigation systems, cold storage units, milk chillers, agro-processing equipment, and other renewable energy appliances — collectively known as Productive Use Appliances (PUAs) — come in. They are helping farmers and rural enterprises reduce losses, lower costs, and increase incomes.
In India alone, the market for these appliances is estimated at over USD 50 billion. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, demand for irrigation, cooling, and food processing is creating similarly large opportunities. Governments, development partners, and the private sector are all investing more, improving product designs, creating flexible payment options like pay-as-you-go, and finding better ways to reach remote communities.
Even so, the number of people actually using these tools is still a fraction of what it could be. Closing that gap is what this forum is about.
Focus on cold storages
The forum will look at productive use appliances broadly, but will give special attention to cold storage, because the need is urgent and the solution is ready.
Across many parts of Africa and Asia, between 20 and 30 percent of fruit, vegetables, and other perishable food is lost after harvest because there is no cold place to keep it. Solar-powered cold storage units, which work off-grid and can serve an entire village or cooperative, are proving to be a practical answer. Getting more of them deployed, faster, is one of the forum’s central goals.
Why South South?
Countries across Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia often face similar agricultural, market, and institutional realities. Solutions tested in one region can offer highly relevant insights for another.
A financing approach that helped smallholders in Kenya afford solar irrigation might work just as well in Indonesia. A policy designed in India could be adapted elsewhere. This forum exists to make that knowledge exchange happen deliberately, rather than by accident.
As efforts to scale productive use appliances (PUAs) gain traction across regions, there is a growing opportunity to strengthen learning exchange and align approaches for greater impact. Countries are generating valuable experience across technology deployment, manufacturing, quality assurance, financing, and policy design, creating a strong foundation to accelerate progress through shared insights and practical knowledge.
South–South collaboration can play a pivotal role in unlocking this potential. Countries across Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia share comparable market conditions and institutional contexts, making peer learning both relevant and actionable.
What this forum will achieve
By bringing together policymakers, businesses, financiers, researchers, and practitioners, the forum will create space to share practical lessons, identify scalable solutions, and build partnerships that can move the sector from pilots to large-scale impact. Specifically, the forum will:
- Position productive use appliances (PUAs) as critical infrastructure for strengthening agricultural value chains and driving rural economic transformation
- Showcase financing, policy, and partnership models from leading markets that can be adapted and replicated elsewhere, with a strong focus on cold-chain solutions.
- Connect decision-makers and practitioners across regions to identify priority areas for joint action, and strengthen ongoing collaboration and peer learning beyond the event itself.
Who should come?
This forum is for anyone working at the intersection of clean energy and agriculture across the Global South. Register to attend.
