To register, please read through the program details below and click the "Register" button at the end of the page to access the registration form. Once you've registered, you'll receive instructions for completing your full CfP Application on Odyssey within 24 hours.

1. Background

Lack of access to reliable energy affects women and girls most in energy-poor markets given their often inherently disadvantaged positions, exacerbating existing inequalities and presenting hurdles to improving their livelihoods. This includes limited freedom in how they spend their time, lack of access to opportunities to generate income, and an adverse impact on their health from their daily activities. Additionally, there is a widely observed underrepresentation of women in the ownership of productive assets that present both time-saving and income-generating opportunities.

With the goal of moving intentional gender outcomes in energy access forward, funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), Shell Foundation, Odyssey Energy Solutions, and CrossBoundary are collaborating to design and pilot a gender results-based financing program for the productive use appliance sector (“Gender RBF”), including clean cooking, in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the digital platform for a gender-focused RBF pilot, Odyssey will provide a centralized interface to manage and track data, including gender-specific metrics, across individual projects and a full portfolio. The platform will be used to streamline the due diligence process for projects, with a lens towards gender-positive outcomes. If successful, this could be a landmark project and could move the needle in bringing gender outcomes to the forefront of energy access programs. The pilot program aims to prioritize learnings to improve the effectiveness of future RBF programs for gender outcomes and may evolve during the implementation period to ensure program outcomes are achieved.

2. Program Overview

The Gender RBF pilot aims to improve gender outcomes by (1) incentivizing distributors of productive use appliances to target women, and (2) encouraging women to use productive use appliances to improve their livelihoods. This pilot will serve as a proof-of-concept to validate the value of positive gender outcomes that are produced by the adoption and use of productive use appliances and will provide learnings to maximize impact for a full-scale roll-out of a gender RBF program. The Gender RBF program also aims to expand the addressable market for appliance distributors by tapping into an often overlooked segment of the population for these appliances. This should enable them to further accelerate their growth, both through new customer acquisition, and by unlocking new pools of de-risking capital that prioritize gender outcomes, which can further mobilize the commercial capital needed to scale their solutions.

The geographic scope of this program includes all Sub-Saharan African countries. The appliances supported under this program include:

The Gender RBF pilot will be implemented over a 13-month period. Once the program has officially launched after the onboarding of selected participants, companies will have a six-month appliance sales period during which they can sell the appliances that could be eligible to receive a subsidy under this program. The company will be expected to fill out a brief pre-sale survey at the point of sale. This will be followed by an outcome verification period that of six months based on when the appliance is sold. During this period, we require the company to share monthly usage data from the appliance (either through remote monitoring or other methods of data collection that are verifiable by the program – for example, in the case of clean cooking, billing statements that show fuel top-ups for the appliance). At the end of the monitoring period, the company will be expected to conduct a brief post-sale survey which is to be submitted within one month of the end of the monitoring period at the latest.

The program appreciates that for high-value appliances such as large ag-processing appliances, cold storage, etc., distributors may not be targeting their sales to women / women groups (the key end-users for this RBF program). As such, we will also be providing customized technical assistance (TA) to select companies to improve sales to women and women groups and would encourage companies that are not currently focusing on this customer segment to apply.

3. Eligibility Criteria

Any productive use appliance distributor in Sub-Saharan Africa that sells the products detailed in the ‘Program Overview’ section will be considered for the Gender RBF pilot. Other key requirements include:

• The company has been operational for two years and has been selling its product for at least six months
• The company is willing to exclusively target women under this program. Groups / enterprises / cooperatives comprising two-thirds women will also be considered under this RBF
• The company has a direct touch point with the end-user /customer, and will be willing and able to collect data on appliance usage on a monthly basis (preferably through remote monitoring, but also in-person data collection), as well as pre- and post-pilot survey data from the end-user /customer
• The appliance sold by the company is included in the VeraSol Product Database or is of similar standard

4. Subsidy Structure

This Gender RBF program provides incentives to both the appliance distributor and the end-user. The end-user subsidy is expected to be passed on through the appliance distributor. A majority (70%) of the total subsidy will go to the appliance distributors, while 30% of the total subsidy will go to the end-user. The Gender RBF will have a multi-tier incentive payment trigger, with more detail provided below.

4.1 Subsidy Sizing

The total subsidy for each appliance is sized based on the income-generating potential of each appliance, compared to its average cost. The total subsidy available through this program will be divided equally amongst the four appliance segments outlined in earlier sections to ensure that each appliance distributor achieves a significant proportion of the total subsidy pool. The maximum subsidy available to each participant will be specified at the beginning of the sales period, based on the distributor’s expected volume of sales. The subsidies will range from 30% to 60% of the cost of the appliance.

4.2 Subsidy Verification Process and Disbursement

Subsidies will be disbursed after milestones have been achieved by participants. The milestones are distinct based on the grouping in the table in the ‘Program Overview’ section.

High-quality data required for disbursement of RBFs such as proof of sales, pre-pilot survey, proof of transfer, and the post-pilot survey will be validated 30 days from the end of the month during which they are submitted.

4.3 Data collection & reporting frequency

• Appliance-level application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from distributors will be directly plugged into Odyssey’s platform in order to track usage. Information around sales (such as invoices) will also be shared through Odyssey’s platform, and usage will be tracked in real-time from the APIs used by the appliance distributors.
• In addition to monitoring usage, we will require appliance distributors to collect data from end-users twice during the ten-month pilot: (a) At the point of sales and (b) at the end of the data monitoring period program, that is, six months after sales. The data should be consolidated and shared with the RBF implementers within one month of the request.
• The program implementers will also conduct a qualitative survey discussion with appliance distributors at the end of Month 12 to gather their feedback on their experience so that their concerns are addressed in the full rollout of the RBF program.

Objectives and Results

Productive Use Indicators:

End-user enterprises with decentralized energy access

Objective: 300
Achieved: 141
Women: 43

Technically supported entrepreneurs
Objective: 400
Achieved: 344
Women: 191

Social Institutions

Electrified social institutions
Objective: 50
Achieved: 25
Social institutions supported or advised
Objective: 70
Achieved: 25

Regulatory Framework

Aspect of the regulatory framework improved
Objective: 1
Achieved: 0

Investment

Renewable energy project developers assisted
Objective: 6
Achieved: 8
Renewable energy projects submitted for financing
Objective: 2
Achieved: 0

Training

Trained sector experts
Objective: 50
Achieved: 25
Women: 7
Experts applying the acquired skills
Objective: 25
Achieved: 19
Women: 5

Entrepreneurs with access to energy (>30% women)

Objective: 200
Achieved: 154
Technically supported entrepreneurs (>30% women)
Objective: 200
Achieved: 333
Entrepreneurs securing credit
Objective: 100
Achieved: 6

Social Institutions

Electrified social institutions
Objective: 60
Achieved: 0
Social institutions supported or advised
Objective: 100
Achieved: 124

Know-how

Experts applying acquired knowledge (>30% women)
Objective: 100
Achieved: 210
Centers with improved study programs
Objective: 3
Achieved: 5

Framework

Aspect of the framework improved
Objective: 1
Achieved: 1

Developers

Project developers submitting for financing
Objective: 13
Achieved: 9

Connections

Number of connections
Objective: 4,000
Achieved: 0
Electrified villages
Objective: 20
Achieved: 0

Local Actors

Projects funded by local actors
Objective: 3
Achieved: 2

Document Collection

Assessment of solar equipment needs for productive use specifically in agricultural value chains in Côte d’Ivoire
Link to report

Study on the profitability analysis of solar equipment for productive use in certain agricultural value chains
Link to report

Study on crowdfunding dedicated to energy transition projects utilizing renewable energies
Link to report

Analysis of the inclusion of microcredit agencies and microfinance in financing access to energy for rural populations
Link to report

Guide to successfully run a crowdfunding campaign in renewable energies in Côte d’Ivoire
Link to report