18:00, 23 June 2021
Words by Smiley Team, Staff Writer, London
A collaboration between ENGIE Energy Access and Energy Web is aiming to tackle power poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, by developing a new crowdfunding platform.
Investors will have the opportunity to support the installation of clean energy solutions by buying Energy Web Tokens, for which they will be rewarded with a fixed interest rate.
This arrangement aims to open up cryptocurrency capital from the global market, thus directing a new source of funding into supporting the drive to improve access to electricity.
“Creating a positive impact in people’s lives is one of our core principles at Energy Web. But the global energy transition must also reach those who don’t yet have access to electricity,” said Energy Web’s Walter Kok.
“We are happy that ENGIE - one of the biggest energy players in the world and one of the founding members of the Energy Web Chain - has embraced the Energy Web technology stack to support such an important mission.”
The energy provider is currently a leading supplier of pay-as-you-go and mini-grid electricity solutions in Africa, with a focus on affordability, reliability and sustainability. Serving more than a million customers, they operate in nine countries across the continent.
“The new DeFi [decentralised finance] platform in partnership with Energy Web will help ENGIE Energy Access deploy more solar faster, by directly tackling a key challenge: access to low-cost financing,” said Gillian-Alexandre Huart, CEO of ENGIE Energy Access.
As of 2019, less than half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa had access to electricity according to The World Bank. Whilst access had been steadily increasing, partially thanks to off-grid initiatives, the Covid-19 pandemic has sparked a reversal in progress. As of 2020, 13 million more people in Africa are without access to electricity compared to the previous year - an overall increase of two per cent - according to the International Energy Agency.
“We’re excited to bring crypto-based decentralized finance to rural electrification in Africa,” said Stefan Zelazny, head of software and IT at ENGIE Energy Access and previously CIO at ENGIE Mobisol.
“We believe this can accelerate much-needed clean energy deployment throughout the region by connecting impact-oriented investors with unbanked rural customers. Combining the technology that remotely connects and controls our Solar-Home-Systems with the Energy Web Chain will result in the first smart asset-backed NFT where asset use can be controlled via the chain.”
Initially financed by the Energy Web Community Fund, the project is being implemented in two stages.
For more information on Energy Web visit energyweb.org.
To read about the technology of ENGIE Energy Access, visit engie-africa.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
