Solar Sister

Solar Sister provides women with economic opportunity, training, technology, and support to distribute clean energy to underserved communities in Africa, leveraging women’s entrepreneurship to eradicate energy poverty. More than 11,000 women entrepreneurs have built sustainable clean energy businesses, and over 4.7 million people have benefitted from the life-transforming power of access to energy.

The Problem
940 million people lack access to electricity to power their lives, and 3 billion people lack access to clean cooking fuels, with the majority of those individuals living in sub-Saharan Africa, where energy poverty is particularly acute. Solar Sister operates at the nexus of three of the most pressing issues of our day: energy poverty, gender equality, and climate change. Affordable, reliable, and efficient electricity increases productivity, generates jobs, and enhances living conditions and socioeconomic success. Ultimately, access to energy is fundamental to development and to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Women bear the brunt of the effects of energy poverty. They spend over three times more time than men on unpaid domestic work — a disparity that is further exacerbated by the lack of power. Access to clean and affordable energy can increase efficiency, reduce time in poverty, and contribute to women’s empowerment. Environmental degradation and climate change also have disproportionate impacts on women and children. Women are often the ones coping with climate-related shocks and stresses or the health effects of indoor and urban pollution, which adds to their care burden. Women’s economic empowerment is central to realizing women’s rights and gender equality. Efforts to lift women out of poverty continue to fall short, neglecting to address structural and systemic barriers that keep women poor and undermine their fundamental rights and freedoms.

The Solution
Solar Sister’s network of local women entrepreneurs delivers clean energy to underserved households in sub-Saharan Africa. They believe that women’s economic opportunity and energy access are inextricably linked: leveraging women’s entrepreneurship to eradicate energy poverty and providing energy access to unlock women’s economic opportunity creates a virtuous cycle of lasting outcomes for women, families, and communities. Solar Sister centers women’s leadership in their work because women are the primary managers of energy at the household level and have extensive social networks and deep community ties. They are uniquely positioned to be the most effective last-mile distributors to bring energy access right to the doorstep. This “women-led, first-light, last-mile” focus differentiates Solar Sister from other renewable energy providers.

Having deployed a network of more than 11,000 women entrepreneurs and reached 4.7 million people with clean energy, Solar Sister is now prepared to scale across sub-Saharan Africa, directly replicating their model to more communities in Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania. They plan to expand within existing geographies and into additional countries over the next five years, with the goal of eradicating energy poverty across sub-Saharan Africa. Solar Sister aims to support more than 30,000 women entrepreneurs, bring energy access to more than 30 million people, and generate $1 billion USD in economic benefits to end-users by 2030.