© Gaia Consulting/ Paula Tommila
The Energy Globe Foundation has honored Gaia’s project Clean Energy Promotion through Microfinance in Ethiopia with the National Energy Globe Award Ethiopia.
The project, led by Gaia and implemented together with MicroEnergy International, Swan Management and three Ethiopian microfinance institutions (MFIs), has established an innovative and replicable microcredit concept to source, finance, and deliver Clean Energy Technologies (CETs) to low-income households and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Ethiopia.
“Our main objective under the patronage of UNESCO and in cooperation with UNEP, is to point out that there are a lot of creative people in our world, including the Gaia team, who have implemented great projects with solutions to many problems” notes Wolfgang Neumann, the founder of Energy Globe Awards in his nomination letter to Gaia.
The Energy Globe World Award winner will be selected from the National Award winners later in 2017. The Energy Globe foundation received 2000 project submissions from over 170 countries for this year’s contest.
The business models developed in the project enable three microfinance institutions to establish scalable clean energy-related businesses and offer various CETs to current and new clients reaching more than 200 000 households and small enterprises in rural and semi-urban Ethiopia. As part of the project, the entire supply chain for high-quality CET for low-income markets has been developed, including logistics, design of credit products, warranty and after sales services and monitoring.
The project was selected as the Best Climate Practice of 2016 by the International Center for Climate Governance (ICCG) only seven months ago.
“The nominations are highly appreciated by us. The key is, however, that together with our partners we have been able to create a business model that already benefits thousands of people in Ethiopia. Now that it has been tested, the approach can be further up-scaled to deliver clean energy technology to millions of people living in the off-grid areas of the developing world” says Pasi Rinne, Chairman of the Board of Gaia.
The project is financed by the Nordic Climate Facility of Nordic Development Fund and NEFCO in collaboration with the project partners.
More information
- Pasi Rinne, Chairman of the Board, Gaia Consulting Oy, +358 400 464 127, firstname.surname@gaia.fi
- Paula Tommila, Business Manager, Gaia Consulting Oy, +358 40 538 4813, firstname.surname@gaia.fi
- Energy Globe Awards -website
