The Rural Electrification Agency (REA) with support from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) engaged stakeholders on the Energizing Agricultural Programme (EAP) on Thursday, 12th May, 2022, in Abuja. The event introduced the EAP to participants and the implementation projections of the programme in the years ahead.
The EAP is a three-year initiative with the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP), with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, that aims to stimulate the use of minigrid electricity in agricultural productive uses (i.e., those that drive local economic growth). The EAP focus is on enabling market-led solutions and breaking the silos separating electrification and agricultural development.
The EAP is organized into three components. The first will support collaboration between energy and agriculture programs by convening the Working Group on Agricultural Development and Electrification. This group will work together to optimize investments across sectors, resulting in a pipeline of on-ground projects. For example, projects in the Working Group’s pipeline could introduce Commercial and Industrial (C&l) solar to existing agro-processing centers established by agricultural development programs. The Agriculture-Energy Innovation Accelerator will work with cross-sectoral teams to pilot agriculture-energy solutions at minigrids throughout the country.
For example, an Accelerator team could prove the viability of locally-appropriate business models for electric rice milling by introducing suitable mills to women’s parboiling groups in minigrid communities. Additionally, the EAP will provide Non-Market Services to support these efforts, including collecting and publishing data that commercially-motivated actors can use to find opportunities at the ag-energy nexus.
Across all components, the aim of the program is to accelerate the deployment of energy-agriculture solutions that are poised to make a profit for equipment operators and scale via the private sector.