Events

Roundtable: Financing Growth in the Clean Cookstoves and Fuels Market

Financing Growth in the Clean Cookstoves and Fuels Market

11:15 AM | June 29, 2018

United Nations Foundation

1750 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (the “Alliance”) and Accenture Development Partnerships will host a roundtable in the Alliance offices in Washington on June 29, 2018. The roundtable will include a presentation of a recently released report which evaluates the market challenges that continue to impede investment flows in cookstoves and fuels enterprises, learnings from the Clean Cooking Working Capital Fund, and the way forward towards building an industry to deliver clean cooking solutions. In light of the Alliance’s emphasis on sustainability and scale, the insights discussed in this roundtable will provide a critical foundation for the future work of Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves to support growth of this nascent sector.

Background

Since 2010, the Alliance has focused on universal adoption of clean cooking solutions in the Global South. In contrast with past cookstove interventions, it has pursued a market-based approach in order to ensure sustainability and increase in sector investment, so as to create impact at scale. Since the pivot to a market-based approach, the sector has attracted grants and equity investment, but debt capital has been largely out of reach due to the early-stages of growth and lack of creditworthiness of sector businesses.

The Clean Cooking Working Capital Fund was launched in 2015 to accelerate the development of the clean cooking supply chain by providing loans to enterprises, many of which were facing difficulty in accessing traditional sources of debt capital from large domestic and international banks. Managed by Deutsche Bank, and championed by the Alliance, the fund began with forty to fifty enterprises in the target pipeline and it was originally envisaged that ten to fifteen investments would be made. The Fund was intended to be a proof of concept and as such had a relatively short, five-year life. Launched with great hope to continue the transformation of this nascent sector, the Fund stopped investing after two years, having reached advanced stages of negotiation with ten enterprises but closing only two investments.

Roundtable Objective

A report was commissioned by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, prepared in collaboration with Accenture Development Partnerships, to evaluate the challenges and successes of the Clean Cooking Working Capital Fund, and leverage this experience in order to catalyze future growth in the clean cooking sector. The roundtable will seek to explore:

1.Factors that directly contributed to the challenges of the Clean Cooking Working Capital Fund;

2.Persistent market challenges that impact investment flows into the clean cookstoves and fuels pipeline, as well as reasons for optimism and examples of how enterprises are addressing such challenges; and

3.The way forward to finance growth in the clean cookstoves and fuels market, and how some of these recommendations are already impacting the Alliance’s strategy to support sector growth.

Agenda

This event will also be streamed as a webinar, to register for the webinar click here.

Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a United Nations Foundation-hosted public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance's goal calls for 100 million households to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020. The Alliance is working with over 1800 public, private, and non-profit partners to accelerate the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves and fuels in the developing world.

Accenture Development Partnerships

Accenture Development Partnerships is an international development and social impact practice within Accenture that works with leading international development organizations to address the world’s social, economic and environmental issues. By delivering the power of Accenture’s global capabilities and experience, we help our clients develop sustainable, innovative and market-based solutions to maximize value while driving measurable impact.