EEP is jointly funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, the UK Department for International Development and the Austrian Development Agency, while the EEP Coordination Office (ECO) is hosted by KPMG.
The partnership supports projects in Botswana, Burundi, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
The overall objective of the programme is to reduce poverty through inclusive and job-creating green economy and improved energy access and security in the Southern and East Africa regions while mitigating global climate change. The immediate programme objective is to achieve greater access to sustainable energy services through the fast tracking of RE/EE project demonstration and deployment, including through technological learning and private sector investment.
EEP Southern and East Africa opens simultaneously two funding windows for early stage (CfP12) and market ready (CfP13) projects. Both windows are now open for first proposal submissions. Deadline for the submissions is 25 April 2016 at 10:00am South African time (GMT +2).
The applications for both windows are sought in two stages:
1. First application stage (current stage), based on which successfully ranked applicants are invited to submit; and
2. second application stage, the final project proposals.
First stage applications will be screened in terms of key criteria, including of the following:
• Technical scope;
• business idea;
• development impacts and climate change mitigations;
• finance and capacity of the applicant; and
• regional aspects.
When preparing the application, it is of high importance to explain how the proposed project fulfils the following eligibility conditions as clearly as possible:
1. Clear development rationale and an economic rationale.
2. Clear demonstration of additionality.
3. Clear sustainable development outcomes.
4. Minimisation of market distortions.
5. Credible contribution to achieving systemic market impact.
6. Incentives that are aligned with commercial partners.
The guidelines also address so-called 'red flags', which are topics and conditions that cannot be funded by the EEP. In addition, specific attention needs to be given to cross cutting characteristics such as gender, poverty reduction, innovation and difficult markets.
For the projects selected through CfP12 and CfP13, the project implementation period, starting in August 2016, is limited to 15 months.
