Green People's Energy for Africa - Knowledge Hub - Small Projects Fund

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Green People's Energy for Africa
Knowledge Hub

Small Projects Fund

Through the Small Projects Fund (SPF), Green People's Energy supported the funding and implementation of 51 small energy access projects in Sub-Sahara Africa. This topic page outlines the funding mechanism of the SPF as well as its results and approaches with relevance for future projects.

I. Overview

As part of the Green People’s Energy for Africa initiative, the GBE Small Projects Fund (SPF) supported international organisations in implementing their own innovative, small-scale energy access projects. Between 2018 and 2024, the SPF supported 51 projects in 14 African countries (browse the map below to see details).

The funding process
(Em)powering Rural Communities -A Recap of the GBE Small Projects Fund.pdf

Over the course of three years, the SPF accepted applications from international organisations who had come up with energy access projects for rural areas in SSA. The project proposals they submitted were evaluated by a committee composed of experts from the GBE team as well as the two special representatives for energy for the German ministry BMZ. Applications were evaluated in a standardised process which assessed whether the applicants met the administrative requirements and reviewed the potential social, ecological, and economic impacts of the project idea. In 2021 the SPF also launched the Challenge Call, a call for proposals designed to attract projects addressing one of two topics:

• Increasing the sustainability of off-grid systems or

• Reducing CO2 emissions through energy access.

As the projects varied considerably in size and complexity, their funding was tailored to the project needs with the maximum in funding granted being 200.000€. On the project side, the applying organisations were in turn asked to provide an own contribution of 20%.

The projects selected through both the standard procedure and the Challenge Call where then accompanied by financial and technical advisors from the GBE team throughout the implementation. To track their progress, each project submitted bi-annual progress reports as well as a final report once the implementation had finished. They also documented financial allocation of funds and construction progress.

The projects

The 51 projects of the SPF covered a range of intervention areas. 75% of these projects worked on either “providing energy access” or “education and training on using solar PV” or a combination of both. This entailed awareness raising, training on installation and maintenance and installing renewable energy equipment both for energy consumption and productive use. Appliances featured included: PV for general electricity production for lighting or the cooling of vaccines, solar powered water pumps for agriculture and PUE equipment such as coffee driers.

Across all projects, over 665 kilowatt-peak were installed with the support of the SPF. Further, approximately 6600 people were reached in sensitisation campaigns and 1300 received training in business, agriculture, or solar technologies. For more details see the Overarching Factsheet of the SPF.

To find out more about the individual projects, click on the markers on the map below.

For a comprehensive, downloadable overview of the SPF, please click on the Factsheet: (Em)powering Rural Communities - A Recap of the GBE Small Projects Fund on the right.

II. Projects

As mentioned above, a total of 51 small scale energy projects was supported by the Small Projects Fund in cooperation with international partner organisations. To learn more about the different projects, you can use the map at the bottom or the overview table on the Measures and Projects page. You can find partner organisations, descriptions of the interventions and their impacts in the descriptions. Furthermore, you can download a comprehensive factsheet of each project.

The interventions of three SPF projects have been analysed more thoroughly for GBE Case Studies:

III. Publications

Best of GBE Synthesis Report


To make the learnings from the SPF accessible and useable for the design of similar future energy interventions, the SPF team created the Best of GBE Small Projects Fund - Selected Approaches for Energy Access report. This synthesis report decontextualises the most promising elements from individual SPF-financed projects and reframes them into more general and scalable approaches with special attention to the sustainability of the projects.

Clustered into the five sustainability categories, this compilation of approaches aims to inspire practitioners both while designing new energy access projects and when in search of a solution for a certain sustainability challenge. Each approach also provides a link to a concrete project example in the report’s appendix. The five categories are based on the FIETS (Financial, Institutional, Environmental, Technical, and Social) sustainability framework of the Dutch WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) Alliance. Most of the projects demonstrated particular strength in one or two of the sustainability categories.






IV. Countries

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