African SCENe (Sustainable Community Energy Networks)

Over 800 million people live without electricity globally, 600 million in Africa. African SCENe (Sustainable Community Energy Networks) was born from a desire to accelerate adequate, affordable, and reliable renewable energy within low-income suburban communities in sub-Saharan Africa, whilst enhancing nutrition, clean energy awareness and education. Our vision is to make clean energy accessible to not only drive climate action but also to enable children raised in off-grid and informal settlements to achieve their full potential.??? African SCENe proposes to turn schools within informal settlements into Community Energy Hubs (CEHs) through innovative business models that make energy generation and storage technology accessible, fostering sustainable energy practices, enhancing local resilience, and empowering communities to take control of their energy production and consumption.?The advent of affordable locally supplied energy technology means this is now possible: we can energise the lives of informal settlement dwellers, stimulating community members to collaborate and share benefits. The challenges we are addressing are the lack of proven business models and community support to make it financially and socially viable.? The Ayrton themes we are responding to are firstly ‘smart delivery: inclusive energy and leave no-one behind’ and secondly ‘super-efficient demand: modern cooking services and energy efficiency’.? The core team spent 12 months in two major informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, working with communities to co-create a workable business model that is supported by informal schools and approved by the Kenyan Ministry of Education. Our study has shown that African SCENe’s concept can be physically and economically viable in both off-grid and informal settlements.?? Our study established a feasible approach to overcome the biggest hurdle in the deployment of clean energy: financing.?The theoretical business model prioritises the use of energy generated by the CEHs for school use during teaching hours and for revenue-generating activities afterschool. This revenue will repay the asset costs over 7-8 years. Assets will be funded using a blended finance model (25% impact grant 75% commercial loan). Accurately sizing the assets, managing energy generation/demand, and costs/revenue administration are some of the areas where research innovation is needed.? We now want to test this through a 3-year 10-school pilot in Nairobi that would enable us to address social-economic viability and prove the business model. Kenya experiences similar challenges to other African countries: unequal energy access, energy insecurity, low availability of clean energy, food insecurity, disparities in access and participation to education/training, pressure on educational facilities, and large population living in slums. Once proven in Kenya, the model can be scalable across many sub-Saharan African countries.? This funding will enable our interdisciplinary research team to answer remaining questions and validate our concept to bring our vision to reality.?? The wider vision is for equitable and sustainable community energy to play a significant role in meeting African sustainable development goals (SDG). African SCENe is clearly aligned with SDG7 Affordable and Clean Energy (via the provision of accessible distributed solar energy generation) and SDG13 Climate Action (via increased energy resilience, security, and awareness within informal settlements, raised capacity for climate change-related planning and a focus on the marginalised), and delivers against a further 11 SDGs (see Fig4: Our Alignment with Sustainable Development Goals). Notably, our proposition can improve access and quality of education, enabling informal schools to deliver the new Competency-Based Curriculum through accessing power for IT/labs.??