Powering Livelihoods (CEEW and Villgro)

Powering Livelihoods, a CEEW-Villgro initiative, aims to boost India’s rural economy by scaling up the penetration of clean energy-powered appliances for livelihoods. The initiative is supporting six cohort enterprises and nine affiliate enterprises to undertake large-scale commercial deployment for their solutions through an integrated gendered lens and use the evidence generated to catalyse the sector.

Spoke with Abhishek Jain at CEEW (Head of energy access, rural livelihoods, and sustainable food systems) on Aug 17 who shared some intel

Completed 2 years of a 3 year, $3mn program and expect to extend / scale up

Deployed 7k solutions over the past 2 years. Products include solar dyers, processors, textile machines, coolers, grow house for greens, pumps, etc.

Brought in partners who provide end user financing (Rabo Foundation, Samunnati, Kotak, etc); some FPOs / cooperatives but also a lot of individuals farmers as ticket size for equipment is 20k to 15 lakh

Apparently learnings from this work resulted in the MNRE Distributed Energy for Rural Livelihoods Framework which (more here).

Some suggestions relevant to funding platform

• Market linkages are critical where consumers of end product are not local, might make sense to start with projects where the resulting product is consumed locally

• Ensure the asset is right-sized relative to locally available input supply, have seen examples of processing equipment with huge capacity but available product nearby is much less which results in under-utilization

• Access to and cost of capital is not the main issue (can be between 4 to 8% once all the various subsidies are factored in); how to operate the machine, run a business, reliably produce high quality output, market linkage is critical