Eastern and Southern Africa are highly vulnerable to climate change, facing recurrent droughts, floods, heatwaves, and increasingly erratic rainfall that intensify water stress and land degradation. These climate stresses are compounded by rapid population growth, projected to rise from around 749 million in 2023 to nearly 964 million by 2050, placing growing pressure on already overstretched infrastructure. In 2023, around 365 million people lacked access to electricity and 580 million lacked access to clean cooking, severely constraining adaptation, productivity, and health outcomes across the region.

The ASCENT-GREEN project  aims to support climate-vulnerable communities across 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa by catalysing private-sector delivery of distributed renewable energy, clean cooking, and productive-use energy. It seeks to increase climate resilience, drive economic development, and reduce emissions across some of the region's most remote and fragile contexts.

Structured around three components, the project will establish a regional energy access financing facility providing affordable lending, results-based financing, and technical assistance, prioritizing rural households, fragile, conflict-affected populations, small and medium-sized enterprises and women-owned enterprises; develop regional de-risking facilities including a risk-sharing facility and a carbon risk mitigation facility to crowd in private capital; and establish a Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA)-led regional platform to coordinate policy, technical assistance, and knowledge sharing across participating countries.

Through financing instruments that address barriers such as affordability, risk perception, and scaling up, the project will mobilise significantly larger private flows and accelerate market transformations, enabling far greater reach. It is expected to directly benefit 28.8 million people and indirectly reach a further 13.8 million, supporting improved access to energy services and enhanced resilience across participating countries.