Charities’ early efforts to distribute clean energy technologies in Africa met with little success. Their use of donor funding to heavily subsidise products such as solar lighting kits would generally fulfil a programme’s short-term targets, but in the long run the expertise and equipment needed to maintain the systems failed to be adequately developed or provided.
Crucially, no new systems beyond a programme’s target would appear in the area. But a new wave of investors and social enterprises has sprung up in the last decade, and they are increasing the availability of products tailored to off-grid domestic energy customers in Africa.
One estimate for the total base of the pyramid energy market in Africa alone is a potential value of US$27 billion; another for the market opportunity for improved energy services in under-served areas of the world is $37 billion.
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