background

The African Rural Energy Enterprise Development (AREED) programme was founded on the idea that impoverished people can transform their lives and break out of the vicious circle of poverty when they are empowered by clean energy services delivered by small and medium enterprises.

In a nutshell, the programme seeks to expand energy access by helping people in rural Africa start income-generating ventures using modern, clean, and reliable energy technologies.

While AREED’s first phase success showed that the combination of enterprise development services (EDS) as technical support and start up financing  can be effective at expanding energy access, it also demonstrated that this is often not enough to get entrepreneurs focused on rural markets. Without end-user financing (EUF) , it often proved difficult or impossible to reach potential users who could not pay upfront for products and services. 

AREED II, the programme’s second phase, is addressing this problem by leveraging additional financing from local banks and microfinance institutions to rural end-users, and reaching deeper into rural markets that more commercially oriented enterprises tend to avoid.  Selected local organizations seeking to set up social enterprises in rural areas receive enterprise development services and start up financing.