Empowering Women Through Scalable Clean Energy Solutions
Summary
In 2025, Solar Sister and Koolboks committed to empower 1,000 women entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania. This partnership will facilitate clean energy access, women’s economic opportunity, food security, and improved livelihoods, through productive use of energy (PUE) technologies, such as Koolboks’s innovative solar-powered refrigeration solutions or solar generators, by 2028. This commitment thus addresses the interconnected challenges of energy access, economic empowerment, and health care in Sub-Saharan Africa. Beginning with a needs assessment and stakeholder engagement phase, Koolboks and Solar Sister will leverage Solar Sister’s network to onboard 200 women entrepreneurs every six months. The entrepreneurs will receive technical and financial training to establish sustainable PUE enterprises that promote economic mobility while advancing positive health and climate outcomes for them, their families, and their broader communities, positively impacting more than 5,000 people in underserved regions.
Approach
The commitment aims to address the interconnected challenges of health equity, economic security, and climate resilience through a comprehensive approach that promotes clean energy access, women’s economic empowerment, and improved food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. By joining forces through a new partnership, Solar Sister and Koolboks commit to empowering women to drive clean energy access, increase economic opportunity, and enhance food security systems through productive use of energy (PUE) and solar cooling solutions.
The commitment integrates Solar Sister’s growing network of women entrepreneurs trained to distribute clean energy products in underserved communities and deploys Koolboks’ innovative solar-powered refrigeration solutions to support women-led businesses. These efforts will not only enhance energy access but enable PUE, which has more potential to increase economic opportunities and stimulate demand for electricity while improving livelihoods and food security systems.
Through collaboration, Solar Sister and Koolboks commit to enabling 1,000 women entrepreneurs across Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania to launch and grow a new pathway for income-generating businesses through access to PUE technologies by 2028. The new pathway represents a strategic evolution for Solar Sister to integrate PUE solutions such as solar-powered refrigeration, solar generators, and other PUE equipment into its proven women-led, last-mile distribution model.
Together, Solar Sister and Koolboks will deploy 1,000 solar-powered PUE utilities such as cold storage in underserved communities; provide technical, financial, and entrepreneurial training for 1,000 women; develop a scalable model for affordable distribution and after-sales support; collect gender-disaggregated data and insight to inform future scale-up and advocacy; and foster partnerships with local organizations, government, and impact investors.
The highlighted objectives will be achieved through needs assessments; stakeholder engagement; recruitment, training, and capacity-building activities for women entrepreneurs; the deployment of clean energy solutions; and an established monitoring and evaluation framework to track progress and impact.
Action Plan
By 2028, 1,000 women-led and women-driven PUE enterprises will be established, deploying a minimum of 1,000 pieces of PUE equipment including solar refrigeration units in underserved communities of Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania.
Solar Sister and Koolboks will implement this project through six phases over three years.
Month 0 to 6: Identify and engage relevant stakeholders, conduct needs assessment and landscape evaluation across the target geographies and communities, develop training and capacity building tools for prospective entrepreneurs and PUE enterprise development.
Month 7 to 12: Mobilization, recruitment, and capacity building engagement to launch 200 PUE businesses led by women entrepreneurs across Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania; establish a supply chain structure to procure PUE equipment; delivery of digital, technical, and financial literacy training to help women entrepreneurs grow their PUE business.
Month 13 to 18: Recruit 200 additional women to establish a PUE business, focusing on deployment, installation, and operation of PUE equipment including solar refrigerators; support women to operate, lease, and/or distribute the PUE equipment to generate income.
Month 19 to 24: Recruit an additional 200 women for the program; begin collecting preliminary data, including product operations and entrepreneur business performance.
Month 24 to 30: Onboard an additional 200 entrepreneurs; conduct regular assessments to evaluate impact on women’s economic empowerment, energy access, and improved food security systems.
Month 30 to 36: Support full cohort of 1,000 women entrepreneurs; aggregate lessons and develop a framework for scale; engage local, industry, finance, government, and non-governmental partners through knowledge management, sharing, and advocacy efforts designed to further scale the effort.
Background
Access to energy remains fundamental to unlocking economic opportunities, alleviating poverty, advancing health and education, particularly for women and children. It increases productivity, generates jobs, and enhances living conditions and socioeconomic success of communities. However, according to the UN’s World Health Organization, 685 million people remain without access to energy, 80% of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and more than 2 billion people worldwide rely on unsafe polluting fuels and technologies for cooking. This number has grown in 2024, for the first time in two decades, with population growth outpacing energy access intervention.
The lack of energy impacts every aspect of life and is closely related to income, with poorer households more likely than their counterparts to lack access to power. Consequently, these last-mile, energy-poor homes must rely on expensive, polluting kerosene for lighting, negatively affecting health, income, and the environment.
The Clean Cooking Alliance highlights how women and children are disproportionately affected as they can spend up to 10 hours a week collecting fuel for energy use, walking great distances through lonely paths which makes them vulnerable to physical attacks.
These unclean fuel sources also cause significant adverse health effects. It is estimated that indoor air pollution from cooking with these fuels contributes to 4million deaths per year, which is greater than malaria and AIDS deaths combined (Nathwani and Kammen, 2019) .These challenges intersect and exacerbate one another, with low-income households likely to trade-off access to reliable and affordable energy, perpetuating cycles of poverty and limiting opportunities for sustainable development and economic growth.
Effective implementation of productive use of energy (PUE) — which refers to energy applications that generate income or support livelihoods — along with solar-powered cooling solutions, has the potential to unlock economic opportunity, strengthen local value chains, and enhance food security systems in underserved communities.
Progress Update
Partnership Opportunities
Solar Sister and Koolboks seek to engage and collaborate with multi-sector stakeholders in driving the successful implementation of the commitment. This includes philanthropic funders who are able and interested in providing grant support during the pilot and scale-up phases, impact investors to drive affordability through asset financing or pay-as-you-go models. Local NGOs and women networks driving women’s engagement and interested in mobilizing potential women entrepreneurs would also be welcomed partners. Finally, Solar Sister and Koolboks are interested in collaborating with government agencies to design policies that enhance women’s participation in green jobs and energy access innovations.,Imagine a future where women entrepreneurs thrive, clean energy powers communities, and the food security system improves; Koolboks and Solar Sister are dedicated to making that vision a reality. Through their partnership, they share best practices, lessons learned, and impact reports to inspire and inform stakeholders. By hosting learning sessions and strategic discussions, they drive innovation and progress. Together, they demonstrate leadership in promoting gender equity, energy access, and climate action, ultimately enhancing the well-being of communities and the planet.