Continuing Private Sector Engagement in Solar Energy in Africa

Private Sector Engagement specialist, Nicholas Bassey, Division Chief, Frontier Partnerships, Global Development Lab, USAID/Washington visited Freetown, Sierra Leone on June 17 – 27, 2018.

The purpose of the visit was to collaborate with the Country Office team to effectively initiate a Global Development Alliance partnership with CrossBoundary Energy (CBE) and map out a strategy for programming the $1.7 million remaining in the development objective agreement for Ebola recovery in Sierra Leone. 

USAID awarded a grant to CrossBoundary, LLC, based in Washington, D.C., to form a public-private partnership that provides catalytic financing for businesses in Sierra Leone. This financing will support adoption of solar energy practices and reduce demand on the country’s power grid.

For the first time in Africa, CrossBoundary has instituted an “energy-as-a-service” model whereby African businesses can pay a monthly tariff for their power and avoid the large upfront capital costs of cleaner energy installations.

In this way, CrossBoundary is enabling African businesses to afford the cleaner, more reliable option of solar energy and save their investment dollars for their next line of business and the growth of their employee base.

The fund structure also effectively aggregates smaller projects in a fragmented economic sector to make them more appealing to investment at scale, a strategy that could be applied to other nascent development sectors and asset classes to catalyze private capital.