Sustainable PV Minigrids in Lesotho - Resilience Fund Project

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At a national electrification rate of 41%, Lesotho lags behind its Southern African peers in both electrifications by grid extension and off grid solutions. This is especially true in the rural villages where 60% of the population lives yet less than 10% are electrified. This is despite the fact that there is need for modern energy services that could accelerate development and create business opportunities. Grid extension is too expensive for rural electrification because of difficult mountainous terrain, and the sparse nature of the population. Mini-grids are a possible solution to this challenge. They have been widely adopted in Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia.Unlike its African neighbours, Lesotho has not used minigrids to date. This project aims to adapt minigrid technology to Lesotho's unique geography and climate, and demonstrate that they can be a superior sustainable solution for rural energy access. We will adapt the successful minigrid model that project partner GramOorja has applied in over 60 remote rural communities in India to create an innovative technology and business model for Lesotho, combining a minigrid with a set of tailored productivity-enhancing technologies and services (eg water pumping, grain milling, entrepreneurship). Adapting this to Lesotho's requirements will see us engaging with local communities to design and test tailored technology and business models that deliver energy access whilst increasing rural productivity and economic growth in those communities.Thus our outputs include a rigorous assessment of needs and priorities from minigrid technology in Lesotho, a set of complementary technology models adapted to Lesotho's needs and conditions, a set of business models similarly adapted to Lesotho national needs and behaviour, a validation of that technology and business model as a commercially sustainable and high impact solution for rural electrification, and a innovative finance model for scaling up the minigrid models for widespread adoption in Lesotho.The project is on-track despite the issues caused by the global COVID pandemic, but we are requesting a small amount of supplementary funding in this application to allow us to acquire smart-metering technology, which will not only allow us to monitor the systems remotely to collect the data necessary for future successful rollout of these solutions (important given the COVID-related timing/budget impacts, which would otherwise have made data collection difficult), but also will allow us to operate the minigrids in a COVID-sensitive and responsible fashion, since they remove the need to house-to-house fee collection and meter reading visits.