Rural renewable energy MSMEs operating to modernize agriculture in Sub Saharan Africa: Barriers, opportunities, and implications for inclusive low-carbon transition

This project aims to explore the transformative potential of rural renewable energy MSMEs in modernising agriculture, by addressing the critical gaps in understanding their adoption of low-carbon technologies, particularly among women and youth. The objective is to generate evidence-based policy recommendations on best practices for overcoming barriers to resilience and adapting MSMEs to climate change, as well as to enhance women and youth’s inclusion in low-carbon agricultural value chains.

It combines a focus on identifying locally-tailored and inclusive policy solutions and deploying rigorous impact evaluation (using experimental or quasi-experimental methods) to understand the barriers to an inclusive, enterprise-led decarbonisation of agriculture. This includes establishing, for each country, the key challenges in adopting renewable energy-based agri-tech solutions, the social inclusion potential of the technologies and the likely scalability of the technologies.

The Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) and Environment for Development (EFD) will support in-country project teams working in collaboration with agricultural MSMEs and policymakers to design and assess strategies tailored to each country’s unique needs and circumstances.

project

Location

Burkina Faso, Kenya, Uganda, Vietnam,

Lead Partner

Environment for Development (EfD)

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Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP)

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Credit: Formation, Recherche, et Environnement dans la Tshopo (FORETS), Democratic Republic of Congo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/M4bV7G

A photo of a woman carrying a solar panel in a wooded area. The sky is lined with trees and the woman looks towards the camera.
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Woman carrying a solar pannel near Yangambi, DRC. Axel Fassio/CIFOR via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/286BAUy

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Guinea - Rural Women's Cooperative Generates Income and Improves Community Life by UN Women via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/Pqdj5s

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