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Add to Preferred SourcesThe Green Climate Fund (GCF) Board approved the first project by the Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (NEFCO) at the B.25 GCF Board meeting held. The project is being developed in cooperation with EarthSpark International (ESI) and it aims to bring off-grid energy to rural areas in Haiti.
Ash Sharma, who led the transaction at NEFCO, stated “We are very pleased to conclude our first project with the GCF. Working with the GCF’s Private Sector Facility and our partners at EarthSpark, we aim to bring clean, reliable and affordable energy to 84,000 Haitians in the south of the country, mostly customers at the base of the pyramid, by installing 5.8 MW across 22 mini-grids. These will generate climate change mitigation benefits of 10,700 tonnes CO2 emissions per annum.”
NEFCO will work with the project developer EarthSpark to expand two existing and successfully operating solar-powered mini-grids with an additional 22 fully solar-powered mini-grids in rural areas of Haiti. The USD 45.8 million project also has a number of softer support components, including a strong gender component, which builds on an already successfully applied ‘Feminist Electrification’ methodology for which ESI won the international UNFCCC Momentum for Change award in 2018.
The project will be financed through grants and loans from GCF, debt from senior lenders and equity investments. NEFCO will administer USD 9.9 million composed of a grant of USD 1.4 million and a subordinated loan of USD 8.5 million.
In Autumn 2018, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) admitted NEFCO as one of its Accredited Entities (AE). To formalise the accreditation and create a shared contractual legal frame for the future cooperation, GCF and NEFCO signed the Accreditation Master Agreement (AMA). NEFCO is the only Nordic institution accredited to the GCF.
Original source: NEFCO
Published on 11 March 2020