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New year, new partnerships
New Year and exciting new partnerships for Energise Africa
With 2022 seeing Energise Africa’s diversification into micro-finance (SA Guigal in DRC) and green logistics with Bisedge in Nigeria, we are delighted to announce that 2023 will be another year of platform expansion, with two new partnerships to facilitate our work in new sectors and new regions:Under the Clean Cooking SME Finance Facilitator programme with RVO (the Netherlands Enterprise Agency), Energise Africa is aiming to expand our portfolio to offer investment opportunities funding higher-tier clean cooking solutions. This includes biodigesters, electric cooking solutions, and high-efficiency pellet or briquette stoves.
We are very excited to be expanding into this sector as the potential social and environmental impact is huge. For the estimated 2 billion people around the world who are still using wood and charcoal as cooking fuel, investment in clean technologies and improving access to finance for end users will be lifechanging – according to the World Health Organisation, indoor air pollution from cooking and lighting with biomass and fossil fuels was responsible for an estimated 3.2 million deaths in 2020, including over 237,000 deaths of children under the age of five.
And working to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 (affordable and clean energy for all) and 13 (action against climate change), investment in the clean cooking sectors is vital. The Clean Cooking Alliance calculate that around one gigaton of CO2 equivalent is produced every year from burning wood fuels for cooking, accounting for 1.9 - 2.3% of global emissions
So in the fight for climate justice, every investment in clean cooking will make a real difference! With support from RVO, we aim to launch new campaigns for clean cooking companies in Asia and Africa in the second half of 2022, and we’ll be reaching out to our investor community to learn more about your thoughts and motivations on investing in the clean cooking sector. In the meantime, please feel free to email [email protected] to learn more about this project, or to register your interest to take part in our upcoming online investor focus group on clean cooking.
We are also delighted to announce a new partnership with the Impact Investment Exchange, IIX, who are supporting Energise Africa to identify new investment opportunities in South and Southeast Asia.
IIX are pioneers in impact investing and global leaders in sustainability, working to transform financial systems to ensure that women, the environment and underserved communities are given value and a voice in the global market. Through their award-winning Women’s Livelihood Bond series, IIX has mobilized over US $125 million to mainstream gender-lens investing in the world’s first impact investing security listed on a stock exchange.
We are enormously excited to be working with the team at IIX, and looking forward to bringing a variety of new impact investment opportunities for our investors to the Energise Africa platform in 2023. 
