Tanzania: USAID Awards U.S.$5 Million to Tanzania’s Off Grid Electric

By Bara­ka Jefwa

The U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­men­t’s U.S. Glob­al Devel­op­ment Lab today announced $5 mil­lion in fol­low-on fund­ing to Off Grid Elec­tric. The award, fund­ed through the Devel­op­ment Inno­va­tion Ven­tures (DIV) pro­gram, will allow Off Grid Elec­tric to test its mod­el at scale and cat­alyze addi­tion­al invest­ments to reach more than one mil­lion households.

In Tan­za­nia, approx­i­mate­ly 40 mil­lion peo­ple lack access to elec­tric­i­ty. Off Grid Elec­tric cur­rent­ly pro­vides afford­able, reli­able light and ener­gy ser­vices to 10,000 new house­holds per month to fam­i­lies faced with an expen­sive grid, an unre­li­able grid, or no grid access at all. Off Grid Elec­tric bor­rows from the tele­com indus­try’s busi­ness mod­el: rather than pur­chas­ing cost­ly solar sys­tems, cus­tomers pre-pay for elec­tri­cal ser­vices using “mobile mon­ey” and are able to access small-scale, rad­i­cal­ly effi­cient solar home sys­tems with inte­grat­ed appliances.

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Build­ing on its DIV grants, Off Grid Elec­tric received $25 mil­lion in equi­ty from SolarCi­ty and DBL Investors, and an addi­tion­al $40 mil­lion in debt from the Packard Foun­da­tion, Calvert Foun­da­tion, Cenairth, and oth­er fam­i­ly offices.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it All Africa.