Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa - Zambia Over 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa live today without access to electricity. The Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa (BGFA) aims to reduce this gap by stimulating and accelerating the emergency of new business models to incentivise the private sector to offer affordable and clean energy access at scale to people living in rural and peri-urban areas. The BGFA programme aims at actively promoting, incentivising and transferring best practices regarding gender equality in BGFA target countries. BGFA does this through requiring awardees (energy service providers) to offer equal opportunities for men and women

Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa forms part of the ‘Power Africa’ initiative launched by former President Barack Obama and contributes to the Sustainable Development Goal 7 as well as the Paris Agreement on Climate. The planned period of implementation is in total six years. The BGFA programme aims, with so far four funding rounds, to establish up to 1.45 million energy connections by 2028, benefiting more than 6.5 million people in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia