Smart Energy Solutions for Africa

SESA will facilitate a structured co-development process, which starts with the co-development of energy access innovations that have a high potential for take-up and are tested, validated and later replicated.

Each technology will be demonstrated in the living lab, and a corresponding information and training package is created.

Each of the living lab team will consist of technology experts, local implementation partners (members of the consortium) along with local authorities (associated partners) and innovators (recruited through the seed-funding call), guided by business development, finance and policy experts.

Demonstration actions will aim to test innovative technologies and services in different contexts that have a high level of replicability and a high potential for long-term sustainability. The project aims to achieve a high level of replicability of actions.

As part of an effort to go beyond the state of the art and maximise the project?s impact, the project will co-develop innovations with local partners and cooperate closely with sister projects to exploit synergies. Solutions that will be tested in this project have been selected on their basis of their replication potential.

Demonstration concepts aim to integrate several solutions to provide essential energy services to rural and urban communities and create easily replicable business opportunities for local entrepreneurs.

The co-developed demonstration actions will be initially tested in the Kenya living lab and based on the initial learnings, various aspects of the tested innovations will be validated in living labs in different socio-economic operating environments (Ghana, South Africa, Malawi and Morocco).

The learning from the validation living labs will strengthen the applicability and replicability of the technologies as well as the basic business concepts, which will be shared in the SESA toolbox and incubator programme.