MicroEnergy Credits will use the proceeds of the OPIC loan to assist qualified microfinance institutions launch and scale clean energy lending programs. The program aims to significantly increase the availability of microfinance capital for low-income populations to afford quality clean energy products in categories which include high-efficiency stoves, water purification, and solar lighting.

Microfinance institutions that partner with MEC use carbon finance to cover the upfront costs of offering microloans for clean energy products and reduce the effective cost to the households of accessing efficient and renewable energy. Individuals who receive microloans to purchase clean energy not only benefit the planet; they benefit from improved health due to reduced indoor air pollution and increased savings from reduced expenditure on traditional fuels.

“Making clean energy technology available to individual micro borrowers and micro entrepreneurs on a widespread basis is an important – and often overlooked – part of the international effort to reverse climate change,” said OPIC President and CEO Elizabeth Littlefield.  “This landmark project has the potential to transform low-income populations’ access to affordable clean energy products, and in the process improve both their health and prospects for economic growth. Partnering with MicroEnergy Credits to deliver innovative financing through the use of carbon credits only makes the project more remarkable.”

“We believe microfinance institutions, with their enormous market reach, have an important role to play in providing access to clean energy products and services to people at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” said April Allderdice, CEO, MicroEnergy Credits. “OPIC’s investment will help MicroEnergy Credits accelerate our growth in high potential markets with significant unmet demand for affordable clean energy products.”

For more information, please contact:

Timothy Harwood
OPIC  202-336-8744

Josie Noah
MicroEnergy Credits
josie.noah@microenergycredits.com

About OPIC

OPIC is the U.S. Government’s development finance institution.  It mobilizes private capital to help solve critical development challenges and in doing so, advances U.S. foreign policy.  Because OPIC works with the U.S. private sector, it helps U.S. businesses gain footholds in emerging markets catalyzing revenues, jobs and growth opportunities both at home and abroad.  OPIC achieves its mission by providing investors with financing, guarantees, political risk insurance, and support for private equity investment funds.

Established as an agency of the U.S. Government in 1971, OPIC operates on a self-sustaining basis at no net cost to American taxpayers. OPIC services are available for new and expanding business enterprises in more than 150 countries worldwide. To date, OPIC has supported nearly $200 billion of investment in over 4,000 projects, generated $74 billion in U.S. exports and supported more than 275,000 American jobs.

www.opic.gov

About MicroEnergy Credits

MicroEnergy Credits is a s a financial intermediary which links microfinance institutions to the carbon markets when they lend for clean energy. Founded in 2007 and based in Seattle, Washington, MicroEnergy Credits works with Microfinance Institutions and Carbon Emission Reducers around the world. MEC is a for-profit social enterprise financed by impact investors. Today, MEC reaches over 80,000 households with clean energy services in partnership with 20 microfinance institutions.

The conversation explored emerging trends at the service delivery, financing, and policy levels.   MEC’s leveraged approach to carbon financing to induce scale was notable at the Conference.

More posts moving over from http://microenergycredits.blogspot.com/

Contact MicroEnergy Credits at info @ microenergycredit DOT com.

In Uganda where many schools are private, a school owner is a microenterprise, and a microfinance loan can help them make investments in infrastructure which increase their profitability while improving the quality of education for local children

In this video, a teacher describes how the system enabled the students, or “learners,” to improve their performance, increase their motivation, and how word of mouth about the system led to increased enrollments.

XacBank is a well established microfinance institution with over 100,000 clients. The temperature now in Ulan Bator is -44° F. XacBank’s clean energy project manager shared with me stories of clients that are burning plastic audio cassette cases for heat. Simple clean technologies such as efficient cookstoves and insulating blankets for yurts can significantly reduce the consumption of heating fuels, saving the clients money and improving the environment. MEC is looking forward to our partnership with XacBank, where the carbon revenues we provide will help XacBank link their clients to these clean tech products.

Although telecom economics make it unlikely that there will be mass-adoption of location based services like Miloki or Citysense in the markets that MEC serves, the fact remains that GPS enabled cellphones have now been commercialized and are available in most countries. Some enterprises (like ours) will leverage them, creating a potential for broad ripple effects throughout BOP populations. For example, with our system, one loan officer may use a GPS device to provide location data for a thousand small clean energy investments.

In addition to our application, newly available cell phone technologies are creating surprising social and economic opportunities for the BOP. A good example is MPESA in Kenya which now has 4 million account holders compared to a total of 5 million deposit accounts in the whole banking sector of the country. Other applications are helping people earn income with their cellphone, like CellBazaar, which is “Craig’s list” on your cell phone in Bangladesh, and Txt Eagle, which lets individuals do jobs such as translation over their cell phone.

The cell phone age (there are now over 3.2 billion cell phone subscriptions—nearly half the population of the planet) creates an opportunity to intelligently harvest the data that can make the BOP investment grade.

My interview from Web 2.0 is posted here.

My ethics professor at Notre Dame business undergraduate studies (Hock) in the 1980s often commented that “creating the customer for the longterm” was an eroding value in modern American business, with long term catastrophic tendencies for capitalism. Thus, stable earnings occur when business leaders take the long view. Creating the customer means to me seeing the potential of each individual regardless of the accident of where they were born and finding ways to make them part of your financial future.

MEC recognizes that measuring the benefits of clean energy for people, planet, and society is vital for ensuring that mission remains linked to that long term “create the customer” ethic.

I got a lot out of the SoCap conference, and look forward to keeping in touch with this hopeful group of people.

“April Allderdice, an adviser to Grameen Shakti and president of MicroEnergy Credits in Seattle, said the influx of renewable energy in a country where 70 percent of the population has no access to grid electricity has been stunning. For the first time in some people’s lives, she said, they are able to work in the evening by decent light and children can continue to study once the sun goes down.

“It’s completely transformative,” Allderdice said. She argued that CDM projects, because they are market-driven, create more lasting changes to energy consumption in poor countries than simple grants or charity work. CDMs, she said, “enable a sustainable market-based approach to rolling out clean energy as opposed to dirty.”

See the full article here