Powering Progress: Scaling Pilots for Women’s Access to Finance and Business in Renewable Energy
Looking around her village on the outskirts of Hoima, Uganda at night, Nambale saw a problem. Or rather, the problem was what she couldn’t see. Every house was either totally dark, or else illuminated only by the sickly glow of a paraffin lamp. The kerosene that powered those lights was expensive and dirty, but Nambale’s neighbors were part of the 87% of rural Ugandans without access to any form of electricity. That is, until she decided to start a business selling low-cost bundles of solar panels and batteries known as solar home systems (SHS). Her first customers loved the product, but Nambale simply didn’t have enough money or business experience to keep up with demand, and she had no idea who to turn to for help. Soon, her enterprise was on the verge of collapse.
Nambale isn’t a single person. Instead, she represents countless women we have worked with over the last 15 years at Open Capital (OCA). They are visionary clean energy entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa whose potential is never realized because they lack finance and enterprise support. Their exclusion from the sector has consequences that reach beyond individuals and communities. At stake are the futures of the 600 million people on the continent who still live without reliable sources of electricity. Without women’s full participation in the clean energy sector, we risk the continent’s progress towards sustainably ending energy poverty.
The good news is that there are already proven, effective interventions to ensure women like Nambale can participate fully in the green energy economy. As a consulting and financial advisory firm working across more than 35 African countries, with deep expertise at the intersection of gender and energy, OCA has seen and worked on many effective projects in this space. We believe the next frontier is to scale what already works with coordinated financing, data, and policy systems.
Roadblocks and opportunities
Although Africa’s renewable energy sector is relatively new, we have seen across our work how global momentum around clean energy is driving growth. In a recent report for the Shell Foundation, we estimated that between 425,000 and 1.1 million new formal and informal jobs for low-income women could be generated by 2030 across seven climate-smart value chains, including clean cooking and e-mobility. More broadly, investment needs to scale up renewable on the continent are projected at around US$ 70 billion per year, making it one of Africa's fastest growing sectors.
With nearly half of people in sub-Saharan Africa still living without electricity, the transformative potential of that investment cannot be understated. Increased access to clean energy will have particular benefits for African women, because they face the most severe consequences of energy poverty on their livelihoods, health, and productivity.
However, while women stand to gain the most from expanded renewable energy access, they are deeply underrepresented in the sector itself. In our work with women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (WSMEs) on the continent, we have seen time and time again how they are locked out of financing because they do not have assets in their own names or formal banking histories, and therefore struggle to secure loans. For example, women own more than half of Uganda’s 2.57 million enterprises, but only about 25% of women entrepreneurs have access to credit. Institutional bias also means financial products are too rarely tailored to account for the risk profiles and informal income sources of women entrepreneurs. All of this stymies business growth. Continentally, the capital stock value of male-owned businesses is six times as large as that of those owned by women.
What’s more, many visionary women entrepreneurs stumble because of education and training deficits. A recent World Bank study of several African countries found that women-owned micro-enterprises were significantly less likely than those owned by men to have solid business practices. In the clean energy sector, WSMEs often lack engineering or distribution experience, limiting their participation beyond retail or distribution.
What Works: Building Women’s Participation from Awareness to Investment
Because these barriers are crosscutting, solutions must be too. Our experiences across the continent have shown us that women entrepreneurs require tailored support at every stage of their business journey, from idea through to capacity building, financing, and scaling. Already, we have seen transformative results from pilot projects to strengthen women’s participation along the length of the renewable energy value chain. Here’s what we have learned:
Inclusion begins with awareness. In June, OCA hosted a Business Opportunities Seminar for women clean energy entrepreneurs on behalf of the African Development Bank (AfDB). Held in Kampala, the seminar was titled “Increasing Business Opportunities and
Access to Credit for Women in Renewable Energy in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda.”
The idea behind this gathering was to create an entry point for clean energy WSMEs, introducing them to market trends, business models and emerging technologies, as well as allowing founders to forge connections with a new network of peers, mentors, and financiers. The event attracted nearly 50 business owners, as well as financial institutions and enterprise support organizations, and the results were striking. One participant is now selling clean cookstoves to a South African buyer she met at the event. Several others made linkages with lenders offering gender-responsive financing products. Meanwhile, women who attended tell us that they finished the seminar more confident, armed with a clearer vision for their business’ futures.
But awareness is just the first step along a longer journey, from entry to investment readiness and eventually access to finance. Once clean energy WSMEs have a foot in the door, they next need support to build capacity and investment readiness. Because women are starting from a lower average level of training and education than men, it is important that they have guidance to build bankable and market-ready businesses. OCA has been at the forefront of providing such capacity building and investment readiness support as an implementation partner of the Energy and Environment Partnership Trust Fund (EEP Africa), a clean energy financing facility. To date, EEP has supported 25 African companies, who have together created 3,800 jobs – 56% of them for women. Cumulatively, these companies have secured energy access for 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, saving 7.5 million Euros. We have also collaborated with 2X and Findev Canada on Invest2Impact, a project providing investment-readiness technical assistance (TA) support to WSMEs, including those in the energy sector.
Other notable sources of capacity building and investment readiness support in the clean energy sector include International Network on Gender & Sustainable Energy (ENERGIA) and the Women Entrepreneurs in Energy Accelerator (WEEA), both of which provide structured mentorship, technical training, business planning, and financial literacy to move WSMEs towards investment readiness.
Investment-ready WSMEs also need financial instruments tailored to their needs. Across all sectors, there is an estimated US$42 billion financing gap for women entrepreneurs in Africa. We have seen that what works best to close this gap are financial instruments that de-risk finance for women entrepreneurs, overcoming the hurdles like limited collateral and credit history. There are already great examples of tools that work. For instance, the AfDB-led Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA), which acts as a guarantee mechanism, has mobilized over $1 billion for women entrepreneurs, including those in the clean energy sector. Between 2004 and 2020, private development finance institution GroFIn invested US$ 87.2 million into 210 women-owned or women-managed businesses, supporting 9,617 direct jobs at those enterprises. Meanwhile, A UK-government and Shell Foundation-supported project called Gender Results-Based Financing for Productive Use Appliances pilot provided incentives for off-grid solar and clean-cooking companies to increase appliance uptake among women customers. Separately, a World Bank-supported RBF facility for off-grid solar in Kenya enabled 252,220 new household electricity connections between 2017 and 2021, of which one-third were women-headed.
Scaling the Pilots: From Small Sparks to National Transformation
It’s clear there are ideas that work in this space. Scaling them, however, is not simply a matter of replicating successful pilots. For pilots to drive systemic change, scaling requires intentional design and collaboration. Our experience in the sector points to five key dimensions necessary for this system-level transformation:
1. Policy Alignment and Institutionalization
Women’s renewable energy support should be embedded in national energy and gender strategies, rather than treated as ad hoc projects.
Ministries should set gender-responsive targets and integrate women’s enterprise participation into renewable energy planning.
2. Capital Mobilization and De-Risking
Scaling successful pilots requires mobilizing both public and private capital through blended-finance instruments, guarantees, and results-based financing mechanisms.
There is a need to expand proven de-risking approaches, such as guarantee facilities and blended-finance structures, to crowd in private capital, channel funds confidently to women-led enterprises, supporting growth while minimizing financial risk.
3. Data, Monitoring, and Feedback Loops
Governments and partners should collect sex-disaggregated data, use diagnostics to refine targeting, and track results through dashboards that monitor capital mobilized, businesses scaled, and communities electrified.
4. Partnerships and Networks
Collaboration with women’s associations, energy institutions like the Centre for Research in Energy and Energy Conservation (CREEC), and local governments can expand reach while addressing social norms.
Financial institutions, accelerators, and donors should also coordinate to build shared pipelines, data systems, and joint delivery mechanisms, fostering collaboration across actors.
5. Localization and Adaptation
Programs must adapt to local needs, whether that is for solar home systems, clean cooking technologies, or mini-grids. They should ensure that local languages and training methods are used.
Peer learning clusters among women entrepreneurs can foster long-term resilience and mutual support.
A Bright Future
What could these actions enable? Let’s return to Nambale, our imagined Ugandan solar home system entrepreneur. Her business was floundering because she didn’t have the money or know-how to keep it going. But now imagine that she was able to attend a Business Opportunities Seminar, and from that, connect to a program at her local bank’s incubation center that offered business training, mentorship, and access to finance. Suddenly, the outlook for her enterprise would be very different.
When efforts like this are scaled intelligently, with women like Nambale at their heart, they do more than empower individuals. They transform communities, energize economies, and illuminate nations. The question facing our sector now is how to get to a place where Nambale’s story is the rule, not the exception. That will be no small task, but OCA sees five ways that practitioners and policy makers can start right now.
Invest in integrated pilot design, linking seminars, readiness programs, and financing into continuous support pipelines.
Design for scale and sustainability, embed successful pilots within national or regional systems rather than short-term donor cycles.
Mobilize capital for scale, use blended finance and guarantee mechanisms (e.g., AFAWA, SEFA, CIF) to replicate proven models.
Track and publish outcomes: Number of WSMEs financed, percent scaling, jobs created, MW deployed to make visible what works.
Adapt for context, ensuring localisation, language, and value‑chain specificity.
Central to all of this work is our shared recognition that women are not passive beneficiaries of renewable energy. With the right support, they can be the builders of Africa’s clean energy future.
Written by Nathalie Gogue-Ebo, Crystal Mugimba, Millie Maina and Nyambura Wambugu
