Finding and supporting High Impact Initiatives
With over five million supporters worldwide, working in more than 100 countries, and supporting around 3000 conservation and environmental projects, WWF is one of the world's largest conservation organizations and their global capabilities give them the chance to identify high impact initiatives and create alliances to support these and tackle complex environmental problems.
In Africa, over seven WWF country offices work on energy and energy access projects and given that around 600 million people lack electricity access and 850 million lack a source of sustainable energy for cooking, the social, economic and environmental impacts of scaling a high impact initiative to achieve sustainable energy access across these countries are huge. But how to identify a high impact initiative?
Designing the process
The goal for my internship was to identify opportunities for collaboration, niche opportunities for WWF’s intervention, and potential funding sources for the Africa Energy Access Initiative.
These findings would come from an ambitious and independent research project to understand the energy access context through a systematic analysis of three elements: the work from the WWF country offices, the work from other organizations in these countries, and finally the political, economic, social and technological context of each country.
The research process, the summary of discoveries, the presentation of insights and the proposed opportunities would be delivered in three different formats. Three option papers, seven country factsheets, and a presentation.
Dissecting energy access
Energy access is a huge field, and setting a conceptual framework was necessary to communicate effectively across all levels and sectors. This map was continuously expanded and simplified after many iterations of desk research, talks with the Global Climate and Energy Practice, questionnaires describing the work of the WWF offices, and some of the final interviews.
Diagnosis methodology
To set a diagnosis a blend of desk research in industry and academia, and design research was used. The methodology consisted of fours steps: setting up a conceptual framework, analyzing the work being carried by the WWF country offices regarding energy access, mapping out the work being done by other organizations and stakeholders through the review of their published reports (+120 files were used excluding website vistis), and interviewing them to uncover further insights.
Conceptual Framework
Drawing from the Open Standards methodology for conservation projects, an adapted version of a conceptual framework was developed as an essential piece to communicate this project and dissect its complexity into simple, understandable and tackleable terms. Insufficient Sustainable Energy Access is caused by a lack of sustainable energy for cooking, lighting and electricity, and productive use of energy. The cause of these unexisting three is the inhibiting environment created by factors such as weak technology, finance, market development, etc. On the other side, Insufficient Sustainable Energy Access has bad consequences such as development and nature impacts.
Analysis of WWF Work
WWF Country Offices do plenty of projects across many different sectors such as policy, sustainable energy for cooking, renewable mini-grid development, community, and government capacity building for sustainable energy development.
Mapping WWF's work across the conceptual framework
I classified every WWF energy access project in the three realms and six factors. (top-left)
I decided to include a visual representation based on project relevance and size to identify gaps and commonalities across countries. (top-right)
Finally, for context purposes, I decided to highlight some of the remarkable projects to show the diversity, size, and impacts of them. (bottom-left/right)
Desk research
Over 120 published reports were consulted as part of the desk research. Understanding what other organizations were doing and prioritizing, the challenges they had, and how they overcame them was key to avoid duplicating efforts, identify niches and best practices, and analyze the capacity and scale required to deal with each aspect of energy access.
The picture shows the Existing Power System in Tanzania as of 2018 from the Small hydro resource mapping in Tanzania: hydropower atlas published by the World Bank.
Tracking finance for electricity
One of the most insightful reports was the Energizing Finance: Understanding the Landscape 2018 by Sustainable Energy for All. It shows that, contrary to the popular belief, it is not a matter of money, after all, investments in electricity in Africa have increased, but it’s a matter of the energy sources that are being funded and the tiers they are reaching. If the investment was redirected, Africa’s renewable energy potential could be untapped and reach those who need it the most. Innovation in financial mechanisms is and has been crucial to bringing economic resources closer to actually achieve SDG 6 of affordable and clean energy for all. This insight helps switch the metrics from how much it has been invested to where and what is receiving investments.
Design research with all stakeholders
From energy ministers to partnered and independent community-based and global organizations the interviews offered insights on priorities, next steps, factors of success, remaining challenges, other collaborators and partnerships each stakeholder had. The interviews also touched on devised collaboration opportunities with WWF. The interviews and project site-visits were performed in Madagascar, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya capitals’ where governments and WWF Climate and Energy Practice teams are based.
The picture shows the visit and interviews with the Solar Engineers in training from the Barefoot College program in Madagascar, which empowers women so they can bring solar power to their rural villages and creates a ripple effect that allows them to install small scale solar PV to neighboring villages as well.
Energy for cooking and deforestation
Biomass, particularly woodfuel and charcoal, is the biggest energy source consumed in Africa. The high demand makes it a very attractive business, and with difficulties enforcing policies for sustainable forest management it is also one of the responsible for Africa’s alarming deforestation rate. Besides talking with organizations like the Clean Cooking Alliance and the Centre for Research in Energy and Energy Conservation, we visited institutions working on the other end of the problem like the National Silo of forest seed of Madagascar (shown in the picture) and the Asa Program, that focus on promoting sustainable forest practices.
The power of partnerships
To understand the countries priorities and challenges in terms of energy I interviewed energy ministers. Their expertise, insights and vast partnerships allowed us to identify niches better. The picture shows a model of the projects implemented by the Ugandan Ministry of energy and mineral development in partnership with the World Bank.
Research institutions developing standards
Another insightful problem was the lack of standards for clean cooking stoves and solar PV in many of the countries. Because research is too expensive for some of the companies, there is no way to test how products perform in terms of energy efficiency, durability, and health (mainly air pollution) until the user has begun using it. Many solutions have arisen to address this problem, but generating the capacity to research these performing factors and develop practical standards in the near future is vital. The picture shows some of the clean cooking stoves in stock from the Centre for Research in Energy and Energy Conservation in Uganda.
Closing Matrix
After spending a week in each country office interviewing different stakeholders, the Energy and Climate practice local team and I co-created a matrix to summarize our findings.
Proposal generation methodology
To generate a proposal a set of tools to synthesize data, identify leverage points, and present the resulted opportunities in a form of proposals. The methodology consisted of fours steps: synthesize the different contexts into seven country factsheets, analyzing the system of solutions and challenges regarding the six factors that could inhibit or enable the environment for sustainable energy access, identifying the neuralgic points based on relatedness and influence as well as WWF expertise and capacity. The last step was to communicate the identified opportunities in a theory of change.
Country Factsheets
To quickly visualize each country's highlights and key elements I created country factsheets. This allowed me, the WWF country offices and the steering committee involved to understand the countries’ commonalities and differences across energy access statistics, national energy policy, energy financial flows, and work from other organizations classified in sustainable energy for cooking (aka clean cooking), lighting, productive use of energy, and other potential collaboration opportunities.
Since Europe is the highest donor across all of them I also included a “top 5” table with the 5 countries that attributed the most and their average yearly attribution, the 5 top recipients, and the top topics they were funding.
The factsheets were developed after several iterations. It was first an exercise to familiarize with each country's context, then as a way to capture the summary of desk research regarding the involvement of other organizations in energy access, and finally, as a summary to eliminate discrepancies between the interviews and the desk research and offer a real picture of the energy access context.
System Analysis & Neuralgic Points
Throughout the research, I mapped the different approaches and remaining challenges based on which of the six factors they were focusing on influencing. Like in most systems, one approach would influence several others. The heaviness of the outlines represents the degree of relatedness. We also compared those to the on-going projects of WWF. Each colored dot represents a WWF country office working on that issue. By observing the relations it was easier to find the potential strategic interventions of a High Impact Initiative.
Balancing influence, scale and capacity through sense making
Theory of change & strategic interventions
At a high level, three potential opportunities were proposed. A focus on sustainable energy for cooking, a focus on productive use of energy or a mixed approach. Thirteen strategic interventions were described in each of the approaches. Details on the proposals for each potential opportunity were described in the three option papers.
Developing the proposals
Post it made it possible to iterate in the design of all the needed elements of the strategic interventions, the following diagrams aim to communicate this. They identify all the stakeholders and the activities they should carry in relation to each other to perform a successful high impact initiative.
Communicating proposals
These diagrams were included in the options papers to communicate the dynamics of the necessary stakeholders and their interventions given each proposed High Impact Initiative
Option papers
Details on the proposals were described through three options papers that discussed the strategic interventions and stakeholders involved in the identified opportunities for sustainable energy for cooking, productive use of energy and a mixed approach.
Independent Research
While this work was done in close collaboration with WWF and other stakeholders the views expressed in the publication are the author’s own.
Many Thanks to
A photo with the Africa Regional Conservation Initiatives in Nairobi.
It was a true honor to work with some of the most talented and admirable environmental professionals. Many thanks to Vanessa Perez, Liana Vetch and Seif Hamisi for their continuous support and trust. Special thanks to all the members of the steering committee ( Peter Scheren, Solani Mhango, David Duli, and Voahirana Randriambola). Sincere thanks to the WWF country offices that received me with welcoming arms and cooperated and contributed with the best of the attitudes (Ibrahim Mutebi, Savinus Kessy, Thierre Lusenge, Philip Forboseh, Rina Andrianarivony, Ony Fy, Laura Muaves, and Irene Mwara). Thanks to Thomas Opande and Isaiah Owiunji for the opportunity to contribute to the project. And finally to the interviewed stakeholders for their time, attention and honesty.