Publication database

As power supply in Nigeria´s electricity grid is unreliable, Lumos, an off-grid solar company provides access to affordable and reliable electricity to homes and businesses in Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire through its solar home systems. The report focuses on Lumos' customers. Especially, their experiences with the electricity grid before accessing solar home systems, their educational and financial backgrounds, if they are using solar power privately or for business and their feedback on possible improvement of Lumos' power supply.   

This document presents ENERGIA’s four-year journey to create and upscale womencentric energy enterprises that sell safe, reliable and affordable energy solutions to low-income consumers in underserved areas. As a learning document, it seeks to analyse the various strategies with which ENERGIA has worked in different contexts. It draws out common features of the most promising ones, as well as lessons from efforts that did not go so well, or even failed completely.

This note explores how and why market systems programmes and companies need to identify common goals in order to be able to engage with each other.

This report briefly explains the approach of shared value, including factors and principles which are necessary for the successful inclusion of poor people into a company's value chain. Various business cases from different sectors and countries are presented and the diverse process steps from value chain analysis to project formulation, project implementation, impact measurement and scaling are examined.

The article assesses the business model and the social, environmental and economic impact of the 2009 founded Ugandan enterprise Solar Sister that trains women to be entrepreneurs for clean energy products.

This study examines how electricity insecurity affects the productivity and growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in low and middle income countries, and how this impact can be mitigated. The analysis focuses largely on manufacturing SMEs which account for significant employment in developing countries and are associated with higher per capita GDP.

This paper is one of 13 country studies on access to energy in Sub-Saharan Africa. It describes the current situation for off-grid solutions in Nigeria and identifies key policy measures to enable accelerated access to electricity.

This report investigates how business can tap into the opportunities that Nigeria's rapidly growing economy presents whilst also contributing to long-term growth and having broad-based socio-economic impact. It comprises a collection of articles from a number of sectors, and discusses topics that include: agri-business investments for smallholders; supporting value chains to increase impact; and enabling greater private sector activity that will contribute to poverty reduction in Northern Nigeria.