West Africa

Access to reliable and affordable energy is vital to unlock opportunities for small communities but also the potential of national economies. Despite the enormous potential for renewable energy in West Africa, many structural, regulatory, and financial bottlenecks hinder the expansion of energy access. Energy poverty is exceptionally high in rural areas where most of the population lives and relies on smallholder farming.

In West Africa, we work with the private sector, NGOs, governments, and international bodies to develop ingenious solutions that promote better energy access, boost rural communities’ livelihoods and create a more favourable environment. Our ambition is to ensure last-mile delivery of energy services to vulnerable people while contributing to creating a thriving private sector supported by appropriate funding mechanisms, regulations and policies. We do this by:

• Conceptualising and implementing transformative programmes that make it possible for communities to increase income and improve their livelihoods.
• We spark collaboration with trusted partners to do more together and catalyse private sector investment in affordable decentralised energy services that work for smallholder farmers to strengthen agriculture-based livelihood. Through our bespoke consultancy unit, we provide technical advisory to development actors and others to promote the adoption of sustainable technologies and business models for improving energy access within agricultural market systems.
• We capture lessons from these experiences and disseminate them with others, building a community of practice so that other more people in this vulnerable situation can benefit from the learnings and successes.

In West Africa, our unique combination of climate information and knowledge services helps smallholder farmers and low-income households in settlements at high risk of climate catastrophes (flooding, heat waves) to increase their resilience to climate hazards and adapt to climate change. 

• We provide ingenious participatory methodologies and a toolkit that centres user needs and perspectives on the design, delivery and feedback of climate information services (CIS). We do this through a participatory system mapping approach, prioritising actions and knowledge gaps. This way, we bring together all involved from across the information value chain, including users, NGOs, agricultural and meteorological services, and the media, to create space for empowerment and more robust feedback from farmers and facilitate consensus-building for action.
• We provide a powerful combination of information and communication technology models to support last-mile rural advisory services and empower smallholder farmers through accessible, affordable, timely, actionable information that helps them increase resilience to climate hazards, adapt to the changing climate, reduce losses, improve food security, and increase income.
• We provide evidence and inform decision-making to improve flood resilience policies, funding, and practices, building on the tools developed by the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance.