Nov 30, 2022
The independent evaluation of the Scaling up Renewable Energy Program in Low Income Countries (SREP), released earlier this year, provides a rigorous, external assessment of the ambitious energy access program of the Climate Investment Funds (CIF). The findings and recommendations from this report, called "Evaluation of the Scaling up Renewable Energy Program in Low Income Countries”, provide a basis to enhance SREP’s remaining programming and influence climate finance projects more broadly.
About the program:
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The Findings
The evaluation provides details on SREP’s successes and setbacks, from design to delivery. It includes suggestions on how to maximize SREP’s effectiveness and impact going forward.
Insights include why SREP occupies a highly relevant and ambitious niche in the global climate finance landscape, how it demonstrates the viability of renewable energy development in lower-income countries, and how its programmatic approach helps secure country and MDB support for many first- and early mover investments. Read more about the findings here.
Taking the evaluation forward
The evaluation makes several that cover strategic and tactical elements of the program that can inform the design and operation of future programs within CIF, the multilateral development banks (MDBs), partner countries, as well as the wider energy access sector. The three main recommendations for SREP include:
- Apply more flexibility to end-of-program pipeline management: CIF and its MDB partners should revisit outstanding SREP fund allocations, sealed or reserve pipeline opportunities, and discuss more flexible ways forward on unallocated funds.
- Operationalize investment plan reporting: The CIF AU and MDBs, working with the country focal points, should work collaboratively to enhance consistency and alignment of reporting as the context of project implementation evolves.
- Revitalize targeted knowledge-sharing to inform project implementation and design: The CIF AU, MDBs, and countries, where project opportunities remain, should convene stakeholder workshops to ensure that best practices and expertise are used to inform current and future project design and implementation.
The SREP program experience offers a series of lessons that may be useful for both SREP and to inform future programming decisions within CIF as well as for other energy-related climate finance facilities. There are five noteworthy lessons the evaluation highlights:
1. Country and thematic structure: Right-sizing country allocations to the threshold of MDB and political interest, country absorption capacity, and scale of the opportunity is important. SREP’s experience shows that scale of resources matters to garner both MDB and high-level political interest.
2. Programmatic ambition: Programs should have a clear line of sight between their objectives, expectations of transformational impact, and associated resource allocations and results measurement. Programs need to be clear and realistic in terms of what they are aiming to achieve, how they will resource this, and how progress will be measured.
3. Policy and planning: When sector frameworks and strategies are missing, programs should allocate appropriate funding for relevant policy and regulatory support, or work more narrowly within the existing country parameters to enable project development.
4. Incentives: Programs should provide more certainty for resource allocation before inviting countries to prepare investment plans. There should also be enough certainty in pipeline management (in terms of funding and timescales) to underpin the credibility of the programmatic approach, while signaling that if endorsed projects do not progress in a reasonable timeframe, funds will be reallocated.
5. Private Sector: Given private sector operations and timescales are different from public sector ones, there is a need for more funding allocation flexibility to increase private investment within the SREP portfolio while simultaneously supporting private-sector participation in public sector-led projects.
The evaluation’s findings, conclusions and recommendations have been presented in several contexts as a way of amplifying the learning from SREP’s investments. This work aligns with CIF’s mandate as a learning laboratory that supports the design, implementation and review of transformational climate action linked to CIF and more broadly across the climate finance sector. Read the summary brief and the full report here.
