Latest Zambia Activities: March 2025
March has started well for our work with Zambia with two events delivering great results. The final workshop of the ‘Building bankable pipelines’ project in Lusaka, Zambia was delivered this week. It is a result of a partnership between CCG, Lloyds Financials Limited and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment – University of Oxford.
The project brought climate entrepreneurs together with investors, government and researchers in order to bridge understandings of ‘investor readiness’. It culminated with six pitches from SMEs, telling inspiring stories of the problems they are targeting and laying out their business models and investor business cases. Indicative findings from the project suggest that 2/3rds of entrepreneurs struggle to develop revenue-based business plans, a skill that the project has looked to provide through direct business engagement and capacity strengthening workshops.
The final report from the ‘Building bankable pipelines’ project is coming soon and will highlight what investors and entrepreneurs think are the best opportunities for institutionalising their collaboration beyond the life of the project.
There is clearly no lack of innovative SMEs in Zambia and across Africa, and no lack of investors (whether commercial, impact-focussed or development-focussed) looking for opportunities. Matching the two requires schemes like this.
Sincere thanks to BHC Lusaka, Prospero Kukula Capital UNDP Zambia MBHE African Power Zambia Limited eBusaka Entomo Farms Zero Waste Organisation Zambia, Greenbelt Energy Astanah Zambian National Advisory Board for Impact Investment (NABII).
The second highlight was completing our training and model co-development workshop aimed at supporting integrated energy planning in this month.
The workshop was organised with Tec Analytics under the ZERN SPF project, and was co-hosted with CIGZambia. It is part of a series of workshops organised under an MoU with the Ministry of Energy. It was attended by participants from the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Finance, the The University Of Zambia (UNZA), ZESCO Limited and others.
During the workshop, participants used the OSeMOSYS-Zambia whole energy system model to conduct and present short integrated energy system analyses. Another great example of opensource energy modelling tools providing critical information and insight.
The Zambia Energy Resource Nexus project focuses on developing a holistic understanding of the energy-water-land nexus in Zambia, supporting stakeholder conversations and integrated planning across sectors. This includes scoping work on the overarching nexus, work on land scenarios and modelling, work on integrated energy planning (this workshop and modelling support for the Clean Cooking Strategy and Action Plan being developed by the Ministry of Energy).
