Powering Livelihoods (CEEW and Villgro)

Owned by Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Aug 22, 2022
2 min read

  • 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