GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Ashden's Powering Clean Energy Investment, with Isona Shibata
What happens when we stop viewing clean energy projects in Africa as charity and start seeing them as critical infrastructure investments? In this thought-provoking conversation, Isona Shibata, Head of International Programmes at Ashden, the climate solutions charity, challenges our fundamental understanding of sustainability finance.
Drawing from her fascinating journey from architecture in the Niger Delta to leading international programmes, Isona reveals how unreliable energy access fundamentally undermines all other sustainability efforts. Her lightbulb moment came when she realised that "the energy efficiency of a building was kind of irrelevant if you didn't have reliable access to energy in the first place."
We find out about Ashden's Powering Clean Energy Investment programme and the recognition that small-scale renewable energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa deserve the same long-term investment horizon as traditional infrastructure. For thousands of communities across Africa, decentralised off-grid solutions will be the primary route to electricity for generations – making these investments no less significant despite their smaller scale.
Have a listen to this fascinating set of insights into how to make sustainable energy progress happen in Africa.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone. You are listening to Good Ge Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the Dines Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, Istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Consent in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:Now, the careful listeners amongst you will have noticed that we have had a bit of series of episodes, all of which are connected by one brilliant charity Ashton, the Climate Solutions Charity. So in this episode, we're going to talk directly to their head of international programs, isona Shibata.
Speaker 3:So Isona leads Ashton's international programs team and has a background in sustainability and the built environment, with project experience across the UK, niger Delta, south Asia and the Caribbean. Blimey, isona, you've been around lots of exciting places and most of your recent work has been focused on sub-Saharan Africa, including financing for energy projects, which is what we've been discussing a lot on the podcast, actually leading to a showcase that you led very recently for London Climate Week. So, sonia, thank you so much for joining Damra and myself.
Speaker 4:Great to meet you both. Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:So, isona, you've got the very wonderful job of working with incredible solutions driven innovators. I mean, that's amazing. We have seen and met some of them, and they're across the world. But tell us about you how you came to be working in this space, what's been your journey? You?
Speaker 4:how you came to be working in this space. What's been your journey? I actually studied architecture and structural engineering at university and wound up working in the Niger Delta on a construction project which was using locally available materials to try and produce a very energy efficient building where we didn't need air conditioning or too much in the way of high electricity demand. But what I learned in that process was that, with constant power outages and reliance on diesel generators, actually the energy efficiency of a building was kind of irrelevant if you didn't have reliable access to energy in the first place. And from that I've kind of had a slightly circuitous journey into the renewable energy space and particularly working with climate innovators in sub-Saharan Africa.
Speaker 3:Amazing. I have a strange sort of connection with architects. I should have realised we've got an architect in our midst with architects. I should have realised we've got an architect in our midst down the line. And so tell us about the Powering Clean Energy Investment Programme that you've got at Ashton. We'd like to start with that, because that's been your sort of recent project and your passion, and we've talked to a number of the projects that have been part of it, which sounds like it's been a main one. But give us that bigger picture. What are the main strands of the programme?
Speaker 4:So we work with three kind of core pillars in the programme.
Speaker 4:The first is an unrestricted development grant, so it's not tied to achieving a certain goal or purchasing certain types of equipment or covering particular costs.
Speaker 4:We let the innovators really decide what is going to be most beneficial to them at the time of starting the programme, and that's driven from our learnings on the Ashton Award, where the award money is unrestricted and it gives innovators the flexibility to really meet the needs of their company at the time that they win the award.
Speaker 4:We then have, alongside that, a budget for technical assistance, which is supporting them in developing their business models or strategy with a view to helping them secure follow on funding. And the final pillar is looking at the comms support, so helping them to really kind of think strategically about all of the communications materials that they put out and what that's doing in terms of helping them to reach new funder and investor audiences. A lot of the time and we're also guilty of this you have a website and you do comms because it's what it's supposed to do, and it can be helpful sometimes just to put a break on it and say actually strategically, what are we trying to achieve with this? And that's really what we focus on with the third pillar on the comms support focus on with the third pillar, on the comms support.
Speaker 2:Now, very straightforward, very, very neat. That's great, and Ashton always managed to connect its audiences with truly inspiring projects, but particularly in the global south. So a very practical question to you how do you manage to discover and track all these incredible people and organizations?
Speaker 4:So we just celebrated our 25th anniversary. So I'm going to say, with a lot of time, effort and experience, congratulations.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I only did that for a year ago, but I'm enjoying being part of a well-established organisation.
Speaker 4:We work through a kind of wide network of referral partners, so we have connections with the likes of Mercy Corps, with UNITAR's global platform faction on sustainable energy and displacement settings, clasp really a huge variety of great recommender organizations and then we also do a lot to kind of develop our presence on ground.
Speaker 4:What we find often is if we've had a national award winner in a particular country or part of a country, for the next couple of years after that we'll get a wide number of applications also from that region, because I think people see the impact that the award has and is really inspired by the opportunity to not just win the prize money but really get the profile and the support through the awards in terms of reaching new audiences and getting a lot of media coverage from the back of that. We do have a lot of organisations who we meet kind of when we're out and about for our programme work and we'll always think about how we can encourage them. Perhaps they're not ready to apply for an award this year, but working with them to encourage them to continue to keep an eye on what we're up to and get them to apply in future years as well. So there's a lot of work goes into kind of cultivating that network and keeping people interested in applying for future awards.
Speaker 3:I think you're also very, very good at storytelling, so no, they're always the. The lovely thing about ashton's projects and awards is that they, they're. You can't help but talk about them to other people. It's that word of mouth thing that I think spreads like crazy I'm so it is, don't worry it's time for us to rip global capitalism shreds.
Speaker 3:No, I'm kidding, but I say that I do want to talk about money, because one focus of your program has been calling for investment. That's been a real clear sort of top line message for your program. For your program, um, and you, what you've called, uh, you've called for patient capital, which I think we need to explain for our listeners to be deployed and for these kind of initiatives. So how, um? The big question for you is how does the world of sustainability finance need to change, do you think?
Speaker 4:I think that we really need to start thinking about sustainability and climate finance as long term investments.
Speaker 4:So these are things that are building infrastructure for 25, 50 or 100 years, I hope, and at the moment, because a lot of the renewable energy solutions that we see in sub-Saharan Africa are, quote unquote small scale, we tend to think of them as short term investments, but the reality is that in sub-Saharan Africa, we are not, in the next 50 years, going to see a situation where the grid reaches all communities across the region, and so achieving universal energy access and achieving that in a clean and sustainable way, is going to be around decentralized, off-grid solutions.
Speaker 4:But that doesn't mean that these are short-term investments or that these are not fundamentally infrastructure investments, and I think that we really have to move to a situation where we're thinking about how we finance these projects over decades rather than working solely with a kind of investment mindset of recouping our investment in three or five years. I think another thing that we really have to get much, much better at is quantifying the social and environmental impact of a lot of the projects that are funded. You know we have to see these as things that are going to facilitate long term economic development, job creation, education, better health outcomes, and so clean energy access and investment in renewable energy project is really something that is supporting the gamut of sustainable development goals, and those things need to be quantified for and accounted in our kind of climate and sustainability finance thinking.
Speaker 2:Well, Steve, you didn't have to dismantle capitalism, but Isona surely redefined investments. So, Isona, what you're saying is we have to redefine what we define as investment, and it is not only very long term, but also you define investment as something that has impact not only in returns but also societally, and also can be shared more equally. Is that right? Is that a fair assessment?
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. And if you think about the development of the national grid and electricity infrastructure in Europe and in the UK, those are things that were heavily government subsidized at the beginning. We saw them as long-term infrastructure developments that delivered economic benefits. They delivered environmental and social benefits and I think that we need to start thinking about it much more in those terms in sub-Saharan Africa that these are not purely commercial projects. These are investments in people, communities, societies, in your economic infrastructure, and that has to be measured and quantified in such a way that we can see this is a good thing to do for the 50-year horizon or the 100-year horizon. It's ultimately going to be with us forever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, I do like every so often often it doesn't happen often enough but I have a penny drop moment, uh, having conversations with brilliant people and I I genuinely I hadn't really thought about this before. What you're describing to me there about this very long-term infrastructure investment, and I think perhaps it's almost dangerously a very skewed global north view that you think the funding of projects in sub-Saharan Africa is all about little microfinance or some carbon neutrality, carbon credit. I'm paying for a solar cooking stove and do you think there's a? We have a skewed vision of what finance needs to achieve in sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to sustainability.
Speaker 4:I think that there is a tendency to see it as development finance rather than, perhaps, infrastructure investment, and because a lot of the solutions are smaller scale, off grid solutions, even a mini grid that could power an entire village you're talking about a few hundred thousand dollars, which is not the scale of capital that you might think of as being an infrastructure investment in the more traditional terms. But the reality is that for that village, for that community and ultimately for thousands of communities across sub-Saharan Africa, that is going to be their route to access to electricity, and so it is a proxy for what we might think of as the national grid and we have to stop thinking about it as a short-term development project and we have to start seeing that just because it's a smaller amount of money or a smaller scale solution, it is not a short-term investment.
Speaker 2:It is a long-term infrastructure investment brilliant, really brilliant, really redefining a lot of things in my head right now and I will ask isona to meet again for another episode for all these redefinitions of a lot of things. But, coming back, many of the projects that you've highlighted in africa sit at the intersection of clean energy, community action and better health outcomes. Would that be a fair summary, do you think?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's not just a fair summary. I think it's what really drove me to my interest and passion in renewable energy and sustainability. Working on the construction project in the Niger Delta, I was maybe a kilometre away from a crude oil refinery, so the air was horrendous. The people around me, across a city of best part of half a million people, had really unreliable electricity access and so you were just powering or listening to the kind of constant noise of diesel generators, breathing in all of that fume. Everybody's cooking on biomass, so wood or charcoal If they're lucky they could afford to cook on LPG and it just really kind of drove home to me that clean energy is not just about energy.
Speaker 4:It really is about the health, it's about your environment. About energy, it really is about the health, it's about your environment. Everything is sort of driven by this kind of access to clean energy. It's an affordability issue and seeing the opportunities that it created when it is available, not only do you have the environmental impact, but the energy access means that you can keep working. It sounds trivial, but I can't tell you the number of times we had to down tools on my building site because we didn't have electricity. We would have days when nothing would happen because we didn't have that electricity. And if we had had sustainable access and reliable access, so many more things could have happened so much quicker. So I think, yeah, for me, clean energy is really kind of at the intersection of an awful lot of co-benefits, um, and it's really what has driven my interest over the last decade or so.
Speaker 3:Uh, I, I again that's my other penny drop for for this session. So there are too many, but. But I can see in my mind the UN SDGs, lovely colour wheel and just almost like the game Trivial Pursuit, the clean energy is dropping all of these SDGs into place, because I don't know, when you think about it, clean energy must connect. You've probably done this, haven't you? You've probably figured out how many SDGs connect back to clean energy. It sounds really compelling in terms of those co-benefits, but my question wasn't about that.
Speaker 3:I would love for you to share with us your reflections, having worked in a lot of different contexts and certainly met many of the incredible often female entrepreneurs that are powering the energy revolution in sub-saharan africa. Are, what's the context? Like, um, that you've discovered there? So, uh, are there common challenges in different countries, emerging themes that you think we should be more aware of in the global north? Um, are there keys to success that we need to recognize? Um, what are there any things that stand out as being particularly unique? What do you see across the whole of the space that you're working in?
Speaker 4:um, I think there's a lot of common challenges.
Speaker 4:Uh, there's also things that do make certain countries or regions particularly unique.
Speaker 4:Um, I certainly wouldn't be the first to say kenya has been a real kind of hub of innovation and a leaping off point for a lot of the clean energy entrepreneurs in the region, and I think that one of the things that has made kenya that sort of unique environment is the innovation ecosystem.
Speaker 4:It is the wide network of sort of venture builders and accelerators that are available to entrepreneurs, in particularly in Nairobi, but across the country in general, and I think that the more we see that sort of ecosystem building up in other cities, the more we're going to see clean energy innovation take off across the continent. On a kind of very different end of the spectrum of countries like Nigeria, where the heavy reliance on diesel generators and the fact that the government recently removed fuel subsidies, which has meant that people are spending best part of 40% of their incomes on energy, is another driver for innovation in the clean energy space. So I think each country has its own kind of background and context, but what's great now is that it's really taking off and so you can look to your neighboring countries or others in the region to see what's working and what are the technologies that might be applicable for our context and the solutions that we need.
Speaker 2:Our context and the solutions that we need, yeah, and also the solutions we need and intersections of the development goals. Something also intersects with almost everything, and that is equality. So we can't talk to Ashton's head of international Programs without discussing female empowerment. Of course, there are some incredible, driven and dynamic women behind many of these innovations that we have seen aren't there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. Ashton was actually founded by a woman, a lady called Sarah Butler-Slos, and throughout the work that Ashton has done on the awards, there has been a focus on kind of benefits for women. It started for Sarah with a focus on clean cooking and the detrimental impact that cooking with charcoal and firewood had on women, who were and still are, unfortunately, the people primarily impacted by cooking with biomass and the ones generally responsible for cooking. So there was always a kind of focus on women's empowerment and gender equality. What's been really interesting is where, I think 25 years ago, we started on looking at women as beneficiaries. Much, much more in the last few years we're seeing women as the leaders of the climate, innovations that we are supporting, and I'm going to say I hope to see that continue and look forward to having awards and programs which are all women at the head of these things, just for once.
Speaker 3:Excellent stuff. Well, esona, can I just suggest, if you scroll down through our past episodes, you'll see that we're we're doing our bit to to make sure that those female leaders not beneficiaries are getting the, the airtime that they absolutely massively deserve. Um, I think it's fascinating and, to be honest, I the I mean, um, the last few episodes that we've done with your help have been some incredibly dynamic women. It's just brilliant. So we are almost out of time, though, I'm afraid. So we do have one final question for you, which is our network is ironically called Do Not Smile. We'll have to at some point, damla, explain irony to some of the international listeners, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world.
Speaker 4:So what object, place or person always makes you smile? Speaking to all of our, the details of what they do, the details of the business models, the projects, the people that they support, for me is just completely fascinating. Uh, it sort of satiates that kind of curious part of me, um, and yeah, for me 100% it's the thing that makes me smile every day amazing.
Speaker 3:We're a bit jealous, mind. You see, damla likes to collect stories, um that, she's a collector and she loves the detail as well. So I think I can see people are listening on audio. This isn't a video podcast, so they can't see that damla is beaming, because she totally connects with what you're saying in like a massive way talking to you guys has definitely been a nice chance to have half an hour of non-stop smiling oh see, I know you should try.
Speaker 3:Well, sometimes I spend the whole day with damla and my face is aching with this smiling craziness going on. Well, listen. So now we're so impressed by ashton, but um, it's been also lovely to hear about your journey from uh architecture and the Niger Delta through to um, bringing some incredible innovations to London Climate Week. Um, which is your latest great achievement. So, thank you so much, damla. Do you want to wrap us up?
Speaker 2:so thanks to everyone who has listened to our good guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So, esona, damla, see you soon.
Speaker 2:Bye.
Speaker 1:See you, good Guys. A podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
