REEEP

MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR GENERAL

REEEP is in the business of driving transitions: from dirty energy to clean energy, from wasteful practices to efficient processes, from data sets to contextualized knowledge and, perhaps most importantly, from donor-funded to market viable. It is thus appropriate that the 2013/2014 year was a year of transition for REEEP itself. 

Building upon a decade of experience managing donor funds for nearly two hundred clean energy projects in the developing world; upon a portfolio
with over 90% success rates in delivering outcomes; upon robust and trusted project and financial oversight processes; upon the world’s most-visited clean energy information portal and unique role at the forefront of the Open Data movement; and together with an international network of clean energy experts, entrepreneurs, policy makers and institutional partners: REEEP was taking the next step. 

To better direct our efforts toward helping the highest-quality ventures in high-potential markets, we drastically improved our market research and focal area development capabilities. To better understand how our efforts are affecting – and being affected by – conditions on the ground, we developed an enhanced monitoring and evaluation system, which will de-risk new businesses and business models, feed insights from our portfolio into practice-based policy development, and further into targeted policy and outreach efforts. The first of these efforts – in the water-energy-food nexus – is well underway. At the same time REEEP added for the first time its investment accelerator component, which will seek to transition graduates of REEEP’s venture portfolio to private, growth-stage investment. With a core partner organization already on board, all new REEEP enterprise projects will have access to this unique program. 

Meanwhile, REEEP expanded its role in the global knowledge broker community, developing new products and helping create the new Climate Knowledge Brokers Group, which will expand collaboration and cooperation between knowledge brokers well beyond the climate and development community to new sectors and fields, and help bridge the gaps that exist between them. 

In 2013/2014, REEEP set the course for the coming decade. In this sense, this Annual Report is not just a look back but also shows what you can expect to come over the following years. 

Martin Hiller

REEEP Pillars

REEEP PORTFOLIO

REEEP’s family of high-impact ventures is a catalyst for clean energy market growth in the developing world. REEEP actively scouts and recruits among entrepreneurs, vets entries and performs due diligence, and invests donor grant funding into promising endeavors. We measure ROI not in money, but in markets changed. REEEP holds two portfolios, each playing a crucial role in market development:

Enterprise Portfolio — Building Scale 

The enterprise portfolio directly helps businesses build scale and grow through a seed-level grant funding of up to €350,000 to launch or expand new clean energy technology and services. Selected entrepreneurs receive more than just a grant: through the new investment accelerator component, run in close partnership with CTI PFAN, REEEP provides mentoring to entrepreneurs in developing business plans and improving processes, and facilitates connections to private investors.

Enabling Portfolio — Replicating Success

REEEP enterprise projects provide critical insights into practical experiences in specific market realities. REEEP translates these insights into knowledge and action, working with policy makers to better understand the practical effects of regulatory and other policy decisions, and design policy tools to create a better enabling environment — the conditions necessary for vibrant energy entrepreneurship. These practice-based policy insights feed back into REEEP’s work, directing investments into the enabling portfolio: non-enterprise policy efforts toward improving enabling environments in specific countries and regions.

INVESTMENT ACCELERATOR

REEEP is working to address a major gap in market growth for clean energy in the developing world: the transition from public and donor funding to growth stage commercial investment. The biggest hurdle to this transition is not lack of investors, but rather of bankable, investment-worthy projects. 

REEEP’s new investment accelerator component bridges the gap between early project viability and sustainable market success. Entrepreneurs selected for the REEEP portfolio are brought into a multi-year preparation program, given seed-level grants of up to €300,000 and access to the REEEP network. The accelerator strengthens entrepreneurs through business training, mentoring and best-practice consulting drawn from the portfolio; the accelerator strengthens enterprises through targeted financial injections to “de-risk” projects.

Phased Financing Facility

REEEP has teamed up with the Climate Technology Initiative’s Private Finance Advisory Network (CTI PFAN) to develop the Phased Financing Facility, a unique program to involve active investors and commercial specialists from CTI PFAN’s deep network in the REEEP portfolio discovery and management process, preparing REEEP project graduates to transition from donor to private financing. Over the next four years, REEEP seeks to leverage €50 million of donor funding into €1 billion of private investment in clean energy solutions by 2022.

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€1 BILLION IN PRIVATE

INVESTMENT BY 2022

PRACTICE-BASED POLICY

Portolio + Policy Lab

REEEP follows a push-pull philosophy – pushing clean energy entrepreneurs and business models up while pulling policy change toward creating a better enabling environment for them to grow and thrive.

In 2014, REEEP will for the first time test its practice-based policy program, a service that generates knowledge based on bottom-up insights and information gleaned from market realities to inform top-down policy making processes.

The backbone of the practice-based policy program is REEEP’s redesigned portfolio monitoring and evaluation framework, which gathers more and higher-quality data from the portfolio than ever before, while streamlining a rapid analysis and policy planning process undertaken together with selected partner institutions. 

MONITORING & EVALUATION

Portfolio + Open Knowledge

REEEP supports entrepreneurs with big ideas to shift markets for clean energy in developing countries, while extracting insights for policy advice to further stimulate growth. Yet how does a non-profit organization with a low-carbon development agenda integrate for-profit market actors as change agents?

To meet this challenge, REEEP designed an innovative monitoring and evaluation framework for managing its enterprise portfolio that empowers entrepreneurs to pursue business objectives unhindered, while demonstrating the mechanisms through which those objectives promote REEEP and donor development agendas. The system incorporates key elements from several tried-and-true monitoring & evaluation approaches. The result is a robust and resilient framework for managing a portfolio of enterprise activities working in concert to shape social and environmental change on the ground.

The monitoring & evaluation framework is built into REEEP’s proprietary project management software to ensure seamless integration into REEEP operations. This knowledge-driven solution enables ongoing evaluation and response, as well as long-term aggregation and synthesis for input into priorities for the enabling environment portfolio. REEEP is working with the Climate Knowledge Brokers Group to make portfolio data freely available and accessible.

OPEN KNOWLEDGE

Since the launch of reegle.info in 2005, REEEP has been a leader in global efforts to promote and publish Open Data for climate and development data and knowledge. 

Oceans of Information

The picture in 2014 is vastly different from that of 2005, when REEEP first launched reegle.info, and with it the first climate and energy information portal to utilize Linked Open Data.Today we are no longer challenged by a lack of data, but are instead overwhelmed with oceans of information. But how to navigate and make sense of this information? To meet this challenge, REEEP is now focusing not on information pages and portals, but on the architecture underlying global knowledge brokering.

Knowledge Brokers

Data and information come in all sizes and shapes from diverse sources around the globe. A new generation of ‘knowledge brokers’ has emerged to help signpost and improve access to knowledge resources for end users. 

Generating, Enabling and Connecting Knowledge

To improve its own knowledge, REEEP is applying Open Data thinking and instruments to its own portfolio, improving categorization and contextualization of portfolio data and making it freely available to all. 

To facilitate use of Open Data among the knowledge broker community – not only in climate and development but across the entire spectrum of relevant sectors – REEEP has developed its Climate Tagger toolkit, a growing suite of tools to help organizations better structure and link their data within and across sectors.

Climate Knowledge Brokers Group

To help knowledge brokers across various sectors connect and collaborate, REEEP took a lead role in creating the Climate Knowledge Brokers (CKB) Group, and was in 2013/2014 selected by members to host the official CKB Group Coordination Hub. The CKB Group, supported by a three year grant from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) will lead capacity building, knowledge sharing and coordination efforts between members.

2013/2014 REEEP PORTFOLIO

In 2013/2014 the REEEP portfolio included
53 ongoing projects with impact across more
than 23 countries.

Analytical framework used to study companies operating in the energy access market 

In 2012, the International Finance Corporation (IFC)¹, in cooperation with the Government of Austria, released a ground breaking report of business models for scaling up energy access in the developing world. The report looked at a number of case studies, drilling down to compare key elements both of commercial business models, as well as of the policy-driven ecosystem conditions in which businesses operate.

REEEP ACTIVE PROJECT PORTFOLIO

REEEP analysed its 2013/2014 active project portfolio using the IFC methodology to provide a better understanding of how REEEP projects are using funding to scale up clean energy markets.

ECOSYSTEM CONDITIONS

The REEEP portfolio included 23 projects funding efforts specifically addressing the ecosystem conditions to facilitate an enabling environment for clean energy markets. The vast majority (65%) used REEEP financing to address legal and regulatory issues.

VALUE CHAIN

The REEEP portfolio included 25 projects funding efforts specifically addressing commercial processes with the value chain. Of REEEP’s enterprise portfolio 28% used REEEP financing to address sales and distribution of clean energy services, while 24% used REEEP financing on generating or creating awareness of clean energy fuel sources.

LEGAL & REGULATORY

Within the legal and regulatory subset, REEEP projects focused greatly (in 59% of projects) on addressing standards and quality assurance regulations, and setting up appropriate information and technical infrastructure to enable clean energy markets to thrive.

FOCAL AREA: The Water-Energy-Food Nexus

Water, energy and food systems are inextricably interconnected. Water and energy are needed to produce food; water is needed for almost all forms of power generation; energy is required to treat and transport water. The relationships and trade-offs within this triangle of resources are known collectively as the water-energy-food nexus.

Understanding water-energy-food inter-linkages and managing them holistically is critical to sustainability in the sector. But while some private enterprises in the agrifood sector understand the significance of the nexus — and some have already seen competitive advantages in nexus-driven solutions for sustainable crop management, processing, distribution and retailing — most do not.

REEEP in 2013/2014 advanced its nexus efforts, focusing in particular on the agrifood sector — the most prominent single subsector within the nexus, accounting for some 80% of total freshwater use², 30% of total energy demand³, and 12-30% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions worldwide⁴. With global food production expected to increase 70% by 2050⁵, the agrifood sector is facing unprecedented resource pressures, with more on the horizon.

REEEP’s nexus focus began with the nexus portfolio within the 9^th Call — nine projects that demonstrated small and medium-sized enterprise approaches to making nexus thinking both profitable and sustainable. Building upon those projects is an in-house study, commissioned by FAO, on nexus-driven business cases within the agrifood sector. The new 10^th Call specifically targets clean energy enterprise development in the sector.

FOCAL AREA: Sustainable Urban Transport

Cities worldwide are seeing an explosion of transport demand. Automobile traffic costs cities billions of dollars per year in lost productivity, pollution, accidents and management, and the transport sector is now the world’s fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions⁶.

The solution is effective, efficient urban public transport

REEEP intends to harness the power of open data to accelerate development and increase usage of sustainable transport in large cities in emerging economies. REEEP believes that linking and opening up existing data will improve transport planning and increase passenger access to information.

The impact on the ground can be considerable:

• Rapid, large-scale sustainable transport implementation suited to the needs of cities and users
• High social, economic and environmental return on sustainable transport investments
• Increased use of public transport and decreased use of personal motorized vehicles, translating to less congestion and fewer accidents
• Reduced fossil fuel consumption, leading to reductions in CO₂ and other pollutant emissions
• Improved access to affordable and safe mobility, especially for the poor

REEEP Convergence

Complete Annual Report 2013/2014

You can find the complete REEEP Annual Report 2013/2014 for download here

Sources

1. IFC (2012). “From Gap to Opportunity: Business Models for Scaling Up Energy Access.” IFC, Washington, D.C., www.ifc.org

2. FAO (2009): Growing more food, using less water, http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/newsroom/docs/water_facts.pdf, accessed 8.5. 2014

3. Hoff, H. (2011): Understanding the Nexus. Background Paper for the Bonn2011 Conference: The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm. 

4. El-Hage Scialabba, N.; FAO (2010): Organic agriculture and climate change, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems: 25(2); 158–169.

5. KPMG International (2012): Expect the Unexpected: Building business value in a changing world. 

6. Transport related GHG emissions are projected to increase by 57% (2005-2030) and by over 80% by 2050 (source LEDS-GP Transportation Assessment Toolkit)

Sources

1. IFC (2012). “From Gap to Opportunity: Business Models for Scaling Up Energy Access.” IFC, Washington, D.C., www.ifc.org

2. FAO (2009): Growing more food, using less water, http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/newsroom/docs/water_facts.pdf, accessed 8.5. 2014

3. Hoff, H. (2011): Understanding the Nexus. Background Paper for the Bonn2011 Conference: The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm. 

4. El-Hage Scialabba, N.; FAO (2010): Organic agriculture and climate change, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems: 25(2); 158–169.

5. KPMG International (2012): Expect the Unexpected: Building business value in a changing world. 

6. Transport related GHG emissions are projected to increase by 57% (2005-2030) and by over 80% by 2050 (source LEDS-GP Transportation Assessment Toolkit)

Sources

1. IFC (2012). “From Gap to Opportunity: Business Models for Scaling Up Energy Access.” IFC, Washington, D.C., www.ifc.org

2. FAO (2009): Growing more food, using less water, http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/newsroom/docs/water_facts.pdf, accessed 8.5. 2014

3. Hoff, H. (2011): Understanding the Nexus. Background Paper for the Bonn2011 Conference: The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm. 

4. El-Hage Scialabba, N.; FAO (2010): Organic agriculture and climate change, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems: 25(2); 158–169.

5. KPMG International (2012): Expect the Unexpected: Building business value in a changing world. 

6. Transport related GHG emissions are projected to increase by 57% (2005-2030) and by over 80% by 2050 (source LEDS-GP Transportation Assessment Toolkit)

Sources

1. IFC (2012). “From Gap to Opportunity: Business Models for Scaling Up Energy Access.” IFC, Washington, D.C., www.ifc.org

2. FAO (2009): Growing more food, using less water, http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/newsroom/docs/water_facts.pdf, accessed 8.5. 2014

3. Hoff, H. (2011): Understanding the Nexus. Background Paper for the Bonn2011 Conference: The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm. 

4. El-Hage Scialabba, N.; FAO (2010): Organic agriculture and climate change, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems: 25(2); 158–169.

5. KPMG International (2012): Expect the Unexpected: Building business value in a changing world. 

6. Transport related GHG emissions are projected to increase by 57% (2005-2030) and by over 80% by 2050 (source LEDS-GP Transportation Assessment Toolkit)