The Finance Catalyst links renewable energy projects to finance opportunities and vice versa, targeting small- and medium-scale renewable energy (RE) projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. It provides advisory support on project development, project structuring and accessing finance through a team of dedicated experts with extensive experience in renewable energy project development and finance in Africa.
Many of these projects are challenging for financiers due to the relatively small ticket size, and due to their limited experience with these technologies and new business models. Project developers may lack the experience, networks or time to identify appropriate sources of finance, resulting in high transaction costs and few projects reaching financial close.
The team assists private sector driven RE projects, on-grid as well as off-grid. Whether corporate embedded RE production projects or grid-connected independent power producers (IPPs), mini-grids, solar home system businesses, or (decentralized) energy services companies (ESCOs and DESCOs), projects with strong underlying fundamentals can be supported to access debt, equity or grants, aiming to reach financial close. The support is available to the whole range of technologies within the RE sector. The team has dealt with wind, solar, hybrid, hydro, biomass and biogas projects in a variety of business models.
The Finance Catalyst services are fully complementary to other support and financing instruments in so far as they assist market participants in accessing them, and help these instruments towards stronger traction and results.