REEEP recently financed a project that enabled the expansion of PFAN (Private Financing Advisory Network), a coaching and investor matchmaking service to Mozambique and Uganda. The project quickly bore fruit: four of the finalists at the 2010 Africa Forum for Clean Energy Financing (AFRICEF) came from one of these two countries. And in the end, the two winners of the CTI PFAN Clean Energy Financing Award 2010 were a mini-hydro project in Uganda that had benefited from REEEP-funded PFAN coaching, and a micro-solar distribution project by Barefoot Power Pty. Ltd.
More than 140 investors, financiers and other clean energy experts gathered at this AFRICEF in Johannesburg last September, where they were presented with business plans from nine different finalist project developers, with the aim of raising significant private financing for clean energy projects in Africa.
PFAN has now announced a financial close on another of the runner-up projects from the AFRICEF event. The SOIL project for the production of biodiesel from small holder farmers and plantation growth in Ghana has raised 2.7 million of equity capital for the envisaged scale-up of the project – including establishment and expansion of local processing capacity. The investor is Futuris Spa from Italy, a specialist biofuels investor/developer. PFAN continues to support the project, which is now seeking to close a further $1 million in equity investment and $7 million in debt. This brings the total amount of financing raised directly from AFRICEF to 5.35 million for three different projects.
