 Naomi, it's such an honor to be here and to host this really important and exciting panel on global perspectives on energy access in developing economies. I'm again, just honored to have this panel of really incredible women who are approaching this challenge from many different perspectives. So I will, without further ado, jump into introducing them. And I'd also like to reiterate Naomi's prompt to submit questions throughout the time that we have with us today. I'm going to leave some time for Q&A at the very end of the panel, but I will also pepper in questions as we go if interesting ones get submitted. So please go ahead and do that. Our first panelist is Sudashna Ghosh Banerjee. She's practice manager for Europe and Central Asia at the Energy and Extractives Global Practice for the World Bank. This means that she's responsible for managing a wide range of energy operations and policy engagements for the bank. Previously, she was the energy practice manager in East Africa. An economist by training, her focus is on project economics, M&E, and a broad range of issues, including the energy transition, energy access, renewable energy, subsidy deliveries, and economic assessments. So basically everything. She holds a PhD in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. Welcome, Sudashna. It's wonderful to have you here. Our next panelist is Lisa Pinsley, the head of Africa for energy infrastructure at Actus. Lisa joined Actus in 2016, where she opened the Cape Town office to focus on originating and managing energy investments primarily in Africa. She has 12 years of experience in power sector investing and 22 years of experience in emerging markets. She was previously at American Capital Energy and Infrastructure, Global Act and AES. Before she got involved in the power sector, Lisa lived and worked in Afghanistan for five years for UNDP and then as an advisor for the Afghan Finance Minister. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School and MA in literature from the University of Sussex and a BA in applied mathematics from Harvard University. At some point, I'm gonna ask her how that MA in literature slipped in there. And finally, our third panelist is Radhika Thakkar. She's the vice president of corporate affairs at Greenlight Planet and she was also an award winner at this event in 2019. Greenlight Planet is a leader in distributing and financing solar home energy systems for off-grid and underserved households. More than 55 million people around the world use these products as their primary source of light and energy. She led the company's global growth from its initial start in India into sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America. In her current role, she oversees external industry and policy relations and focuses on strengthening the internal culture, policy and governance of the company. She also serves as president of the board of directors of GOGLA, which is the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association. Thank you all so much for being here. One of the reasons that I was excited about bringing this particular group of women together is because each of you approach energy access in such different ways and from such different perspectives. And I wanted to start out with a question to each of you that gets at where that came from. Each of you has built a really fascinating career based on energy investment and energy access in emerging markets. And I'd love to hear from each of you in just a few minutes about the moment you knew that that's what you wanted to do and why. And I'll start with Sudeshna. Thank you very much, Katie. And it's great to be in this panel with Lisa and Radhika. So today's Diwali, which is our Festival of Light. And a lot of inspiration really comes from my own country, my home country, India, where I grew up. And it gave me a sense of light changing lives. My family always had an electricity connection, very few in those days who did. And we suffered extensive power cuts and also so many of our family relatives who lived in rural areas, depending on kerosene. I stumbled of course on pursuing energy work much later in my career, but the potential of energy to change lives really stayed with me throughout my adult life. Later on in various African countries I have traveled in many far corners of Africa and I've always been inspired by how much of the economy was driven by energy and how much of the household life was affected by the advent of energy. When I saw children, when I saw women, when I saw young people, it was amazing to see that, you know, how energy was changing rural life. So I worked in East Africa for many years as KTU were mentioning in your introductory remarks. And I saw so many young people with impressive academic credentials working on energy access. And that is exciting because it means that young generation is excited by this challenge. And that is what really keeps me in this job and makes me wake up in the morning and realize that, you know, I'm doing something useful with my credentials, with my experience and trying to make the world a little bit better place. Thank you. Great, thank you so much, Sudeshna. Lisa, let's same question to you. Thank you, KB. And thank you so much for the invite. This is my first time at a C3E event and I'm so excited to be involved. So first off, thank you. I think you mentioned at the beginning in my intro that I spent five years working in Afghanistan. First, for UNDP on reintegration programs for former soldiers, which was mostly done through NGOs working on the ground. And then second for the Afghan finance minister. I found it kind of a fascinating education, I guess, in working in an emerging market. It was really my first time. And with the UN, it was more the microsite of things. So how do NGOs work on the ground? How does development work? How do NGOs get funded? How do you monitor and evaluate things? And then when I worked for the finance minister it was like a crash course on the macro side of an emerging market. So what does it actually mean when the IMF comes to town? What do those meetings mean? What do the benchmarks mean? What does Sudeshna do at the World Bank? And what do her colleagues do for the energy sector versus in direct budget support type of programs or other things? And what does it mean in terms of confessional loans and grants for the minister's budget going forward? That said, it was fascinating but what I was really excited about was what was happening actually in the private sector in Afghanistan at the time where private sector companies were coming in and investing in emerging markets not from the development perspective particularly but with the goal of making money but also building economies. So I saw mobile phone companies coming in. I saw agriculture companies coming in manufacturing all of this to make money but have a positive impact. So I had this idea that I wanted to be back in emerging markets but on the private sector side and to do something that was sort of tangible I really needed to be able to touch it. So I didn't really want to I don't want to pick on any companies I didn't want to sell soft drinks from one market to another or brands or something like that. I wanted to build something. So I applied to business school. This was 2007. I went to Chicago. I saw my first wind farm out in the Midwest and it was kind of the time of the renewables revolution and it all clicked. The other thing I learned in Afghanistan was how to work a generator. So there was very little city power which is very normal for many emerging markets and this just the day to day working with, oh, power's out, go turn on the generator. Oh, shoot, somebody forgot to buy diesel. And all of that to really understand the impact that power makes on an economy. So I'd say it was a series of moments but that's what really brought me to where I am today. Yeah, thanks, Lisa. That's an incredible story. Okay, Radhika, same question to you. Yeah, thanks, Katie. And I'm so inspired just hearing, you know, Lisa's position of stories and a lot of that resonates with me as well. I think in my case, I came into this field a bit by chance. I'm not an engineer. I didn't study renewable energy in my education at the start of my career. I've always been interested in social equity and justice. And so after some years in the public sector and in healthcare consulting in the US, I had an opportunity to join Greenlight Planet in its very early days. And I was drawn by the company's commitment to using commercial means to solve a very large global development challenge. But admittedly in the first month or two, I was like, I felt a bit of an identity rift. I'm not a technology person and here I was selling effectively gadgets, right? I was learning how to explain how solar energy works, the efficiency of lithium batteries, lumen output and why does that matter to customers? And I didn't feel personally, I wasn't sure I could bridge this reality that I was kind of selling consumer durables with my social drive. But this changed drastically when I made my first trip to rural villages and understood how our products work, right? So I was in Bihar in India and in particular, I remember visiting a house and I can still imagine it in my mind right now. What struck me was the family had recently repainted all of their walls, bright, fresh, white, but they left one patch exactly as it was before, which was really dingy and nothing even close to white. And they kept that patch as a reminder of the ash that had previously covered their walls, not just the walls, but the air that they breathed and the insides of their lungs, really, from all the kerosene lamps that they used for light before they had discovered sun king or our solar lamps. And that was just so profound for me. I realized in that moment that these were not gadgets, these were transformative, really life-changing instruments, really simple, really tiny. Our first product was like this big. It was nothing complex. And yet it had this tremendously profound impact on this one family and really every family that we'd come in touch with on those days. And I realized that how simple what we had to do was, if we could just get our solar lamps and home systems to every household that lacked energy access, we could transform a billion plus lives, not actually that simple, but it's such a simple solution to such a massive problem. And I think that's what kept me going. And so what I thought was gonna be like a one or two year stopover at this early-stage company has been nearly 13 years. It's been incredibly challenging, but super rewarding and really meaningful throughout. And here I am, and with no energy. Great, thank you so much. Lisa, I'm gonna jump to you because your work at Actus focuses on managing and investing in energy projects of various kinds. And I think that's something that probably a lot of people in the audience today are familiar with, but you're doing it in emerging, sometimes very fragile and challenging markets. And that comes with many particularities, but I'm wondering what you think is the primary difference in how you have to approach your work in those markets compared to what people might be used to in the US or Europe? Yeah, sure, thank you, Katie. And it may be right before you. And so I'll just kind of clarify. I think a lot of times people think investors in emerging markets are either multilaterals or development agencies or have a double bottom line. And although sustainability is at our core, we are a private sector player looking to make returns for our investors. So Actus where the private equity fund where I work is we've raised about $24 billion. And it's mainly from pension funds, institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds and things like that. So I think it is a space where institutional investors are starting to go and we're helping to bring them there. But how do I find it different than the more developed markets? These are inefficient markets. And I kind of love that. And I think the main, one of the main things that gets me up and on Zoom eight hours a day or I just made my first actual business trip to Uganda for eight days where I went on site visits and I met with government officials and it was so refreshing. But it's the people that you meet. And it's both the people around the table of a deal and then obviously the impacts you make on communities and landowners and everything. But the people around the table, I feel like it's not a numbers game in these markets. You must, you need to make money and the numbers need to work. But if you are not engaging on many different levels, there's small markets in a way. People at the regulator, the utility, the finance ministry, the presidency, they all went to school together. Many of them are related or they work together back when at the utility. And so they're very small markets. And even though there are laws in place, you need to really find your way around these markets and partner and talk to the right people. Corruption is an issue I had once the head of procurement at the Kenyon utility. I knew he liked tea. So I brought him a $5 box of Roybus tea from South Africa, which I knew he liked. And he wouldn't take it because he was so afraid that somebody would come and then accuse him of getting brushed up by a big investor. And they are doing lifestyle audits now, people who work at that utility. Or my local partner also in Kenya who started out his life as a cardiologist. And one of the best ways that he can assemble government officials is because he was their doctor. So when your cardiologist calls, you take that call, you know, it's not, he doesn't have a lot of vested interests in businesses around government, but it's just a small market. And I enjoy that. It kind of, I think it plays to my strengths, but I also just enjoy how those deals are done. I'll stop there. Thanks, Lisa. As a former US government official who operated under very strict gift rules, I identify with how much he probably wanted to take the tea. And just kidding. So the theme of this year's session is about equity and it's something that we've seen pop up more and more around conversations related to climate and energy access, which is a fantastic and frankly, belated development in this field. I wanna turn to first Sudeshna and then Lisa again. Obviously while we're sitting here, COP26 is happening in Scotland. And this year we've seen a lot of heads of state from emerging economies come forward, including from India, Uganda, Nigeria, Malawi, just in the past few weeks with very strong statements about the need for continued energy development in their countries. And at the same time, we've seen high emitting countries including the US and countries across Europe, kind of yet again, not go far enough in reducing their own emissions. And I'm curious from both of you, how your understanding and your thinking on climate change, particularly has shifted over time in relation to your work. So Sudeshna, I'll start with you. Yeah, thanks a lot. It is a very relevant question this week. And as I mentioned earlier, after many years of working in Africa and now working in Europe and Central Asia region, the countries that you named in Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, there's the entire African continent taken together is very, very less than 10% of the total emissions. So it doesn't matter so much what kind of promises, even if they're upping their game, it's still not enough unless the big emitters really sort of change the game. And now I work in a part of the world where there are these big emitters like Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey. And you realize that how difficult it is, how tough, challenging multi-dimensional energy transition is, it's so easy to come up with the reports to show the transition pathways, decarbonization pathways. I think we are all very good at modeling. Reports come out all the time about how the net zero will happen. But when we work, for us in the World Bank, we work with the clients on both the policy dimension as well as implementation. We are both at the upstream as well as in the downstream. So we work with the countries on the implementation of some of these energy transition policies and you really get to realize how politically sensitive, how tough and how sort of sensitive some of these topics are. And also it is important to realize that the building blocks need to be put in place for the net zero by 2050, 2060, 2070, whatever the ambition of the country is coming up with the building blocks need to be put in now, even yesterday. But you realize that the countries are very illiquid to think about it. And what I see as I work with so many of our clients is that we focus on the opportunities. We constantly talk about how important energy transition is as an opportunity rather than just as a cost. Because most of the time, the politicians always talk about the short-term cost because the vision of the politicians is also short-term. But when you think about the longer-term benefits and you bring in much more about the benefits to the population and to the politicians and to the policymakers, that's when you realize that you have to think about it in a much more, because 2050, 2060, 2070 is so out there. People cannot even imagine how far that is today, sitting here in 2021. And I did my PhD on privatization of infrastructure assets in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And the issues were similar because there is a huge short-term cost associated with people losing their jobs, et cetera, because of privatization. But there are also long-term benefits of efficiency, of financing, new financing coming in, et cetera. And all this happened in the context of political framework with short-term vision. So I also have much more appreciation of how politically sensitive decarbonization is. And as I mentioned, we come up with reports all the time from the World Bank, from IEA, from many, many agencies are coming up with it. But it's really, really tough to convince the electorate that how this long-term agenda needs to be broken down into bite-sized pieces. And we need to start with those activities and actions right now. Even yesterday, we are already late. And you also realize how important the responsibility is to think about climate change for our children, for our grandchildren, otherwise what is a planet that we need for them? So I really take this responsibility seriously. I think everybody does, but you also see that it's incredibly tough and challenging and multi-dimensional. Thank you. Thanks, Sudeshna. Let's jump over to you, Lisa. How has your thinking on climate change and its connection to your work evolved over time? Thanks, Katie. I think having worked in Africa now, I guess 12 or 13 years, I've definitely perhaps come to a more nuanced view. I was in Uganda when Moose 78, the president of Uganda published an article in the Wall Street Journal, Solar and Wind Forced Poverty on Africa. We have, I think, 15 wind and solar projects in Africa. So my first reaction was negative. But when you get to the heart of what he's saying and what a lot of leaders are saying in perhaps, perhaps in better ways, is that it does feel rather patronizing for the West and some of the East who are the biggest emitters to be forcing their policies through their funding on to Africa and forcing a choice between poverty alleviation and energy access and only financing clean energy. And this is in some ways causing more pain than good. And that has been a backlash from the African countries saying, look, we don't have enough base load power. Our electrification rate is still under 50%. And you're saying that we can't use our domestic gas resources and build one or two base load plants that will affect hundreds of thousands of people in poverty with no electricity. And so I've taken a more, I'd say nuanced view on that. And I still support that in certain situations where it makes sense. But I think there are some fantastic low-hanging fruit that would be a better focus for COP. And I think it has become a good focus or been some good announcement, which is actually where I'm sitting now in South Africa. We're still over 90% of the generation here is coal-based. And I think that the various mainly Western governments are doing a great thing by tying significant funding to the decommissioning of that coal and then funding what they're calling the just transition, which is, as Sudashna was saying, just that short-term political outlook of, oh no, all my voters are coal miners in this province in South Africa. And I'm gonna lose power if they lose their jobs to try and help them on a medium-term basis with a significant amount of funding. And so that specific low-hanging fruit I really hope comes through with real action. Yeah, thank you. I was really excited to see that get announced and hope that that sets a model for what can happen in other countries as well. I'm gonna stick on the theme of justice and I'm gonna jump to you, Radhika. You mentioned that justice was really one of kind of the driving forces that got you interested in this field in the first place. And for someone like you who's working on the very small scale of energy access, is there an important question or a challenge related to justice in the energy access world that you don't think enough people are thinking about? Yeah, I think when we look at on-grid households, so the opposite of what I do or what we do, really everywhere in the world, I think it's important for us to remember that they were able to access the grid and I think all of us here were able to access the grid thanks to massive public infrastructure investments, right? Individual households didn't say, I think I want the grid and go and build it for their house. The public works brought the grid to them and on the other side, when we look at off-grid homes, they're expected to pay for their own energy, the source of energy and how they use it, the generation as well on their own. So whether that's as simple as a kerosene lamp or a diesel generator or purchasing a solar home system like we make. And in most cases, when we look at those that are not well-served by the grid or not served at all by the grid, they're also the most low-income citizens or low-income earners in their respective societies. And so not only can they not live as productively as their wealthier counterparts because they can't study at night, they can't keep their businesses running after the sun sets, they can't access information or get online because they don't have computers. They also are paying so much more for so much less output. And I think similarly kind of imbalanced expectations fall on clean energy companies like ours that are creating solutions for these lower-income households, right? I think we've only been around or our iteration of this sort of our segment of the industry has been around for less than 15 years. And I think most of the companies in my sector the distributed renewable energy sector, particularly working in Africa and in Asia, I'd say even younger than 10 years. And it's really difficult for companies in our space to raise money, to keep the work that we're doing going, to raise even really basic working capital. And there's a lot of expectation that we should be profitable. And some of us are, many are not. Most of the companies that are five, six, seven, eight years old are not there yet. They may get there eventually, but they're not there yet. And I think that kind of imbalanced. So there's this like outsized expectation that our sector should be profitable. When we are serving the hardest to reach, those that have just been overlooked because they are so hard to reach and so low-income. And yet, since they were competing against that sort of who we are doing the work for or that couldn't reach has been subsidized for decades and in the US over a hundred years. And most utilities are still not profitable. And so I think that inequity is massive, right? At the sort of, at the company level of like who's bringing energy to our customers, that all boils down to what can offered households access and how expensive is it? And who's enabling them to access energy? So I think positive side of this is we are starting to see a shift and some recognition of this definitely in some parts of the world. Kenya, Nigeria, Togo to name a few have in recent years launched programs to subsidize energy access for the hardest to reach households. And funding comes from the likes of the World Bank and other large donors, but these programs are limited. They're really complicated to run in. And I think they're really important for the world to pay attention to if we are going to and if we're committed to meeting SCG7 by 2030 especially. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm going to shift gears just a little bit because we are at this incredible event that focuses on women who are involved in the energy sector. And I think in the international development world we hear a lot of pretty general statements about the impacts of energy on women. And they often don't go very much in depth or aren't very specific. I'm curious first from you, Radhika what does that really look like on the ground? Is there a specific example from your work that stands out and really highlights the impact on women? Yeah, I'll share two really small stories that I think are quite profound or were profound for me. The first is about eight or nine years ago I was in Rwanda with a team of photographers we'd hired to take some pictures to create marketing materials for our customers. And so we were in some of our customers' homes taking pictures of them going about the normal life using our solar lamps and solar home systems. And for one of the pictures we went into the kitchen, which is a separate room off of the main house with the mother that the female head of the household and was preparing food like the normal meal for her family over a wood burning stove. And we closed off the door and we were taking these really beautiful pictures showing our Sun King lamp right next to her going about her normal work. And we were in there maybe like 10, 15 minutes trying to get the right angles and the right light. And as we were in there, the smoke from the stove just took over this space. It was myself, a photographer, someone else kind of helping set the scene and the woman and 15 minutes in I thought I was gonna faint because the fumes from the stove were just unbearable. So noxious. And I was just thinking, this woman, this is 15 minutes. A meal does not cook in 15 minutes. She's sitting in there multiple times a day preparing a meal for her family, inhaling these noxious fumes every single day. And just, at the time we were not selling stoves we were selling lights, but that's just, it's an example, right? A kerosene lamp does the same thing. And that was just profound. And I think, when you think about in off-grid households in sub-Saharan Africa and most of South Asia, it's women and children that spend most of the time indoors and who are most exposed to the, to the, to the block footprint and just the terrible fumes there. And so that's one. And then the other is the story of one of our sales agents, Everlene, who goes door-to-door in her community and sells sunken products. And you know, I think that's just the reason she became such an advocate and so successful at selling her products is she had a very similar experience as the woman that I visited in Rwanda and knew that just how beneficial a solar lamp was and a solar home system was for her family. And she's been so successful in selling to her community that she abandoned her initial career which is selling bananas and selling solar lamps and solar home systems. She's well respected in her community and has made enough money in doing this that she's been able to purchase land, a couple of cows and is putting her entire family through school. So, you know, I think women benefit tremendously from clean energy and then are also incredible champions and allies to really get clean energy into more households around the world. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Sudeshna, what about you? From the World Bank perspective, I remember being at Power Africa and you and I actually talked a couple of times about how to make sure that our programming was really not only targeting women as kind of consumers but also just as Radhika just said as agents of energy expansion and development. What stands out to you from that? Yeah, thanks a lot and thanks for asking this question because it's a topic very close to my heart. So, I can also mention a couple of instances where in Kenya, actually both of them in Kenya where I've worked for many, many years. So, we worked on this project called Kenya of grid solar access project. In fact, one of the winners of this year, Ronda, she was in my team on this project. And the first time there's such of grid solutions that Radhika was talking about where really provided a scale in 14 most underserved counties of Kenya. So, you can imagine these are the most remote and poor parts of Kenya. And for this, we did some fieldwork and I went to some of the villages, et cetera, where our products would be sort of available as a result of the financing of the project. So, one of the counties was Turkana. Which is where Lake Turkana is. It's one of the largest wind farms is in that county. So, we went to the small houses, very, very small houses. And one of the houses where I met a mother who had a small solar light. And it was very gratified to see her using this to charge phones. And she was having number of the neighbors coming into the house and they were charging their phones in that small solar light. And then Turkana is in the desert part of Kenya. It was very sort of a lot of sand there. And there are a lot of insects who come in in the night. So, she uses that small solar light in the night to go through her entire little house to see if there are any insects coming in so that she can protect her children. And then I was standing there thinking, my God, can you imagine this and these sort of insect bites are very, it can be very fatal for young children. So, this woman is so dependent on this solar light to make sure her family is safe every night that those insects do not come inside the house. So, that was really profound experience for me. The second one was a slum electrification program in Nairobi and the World Bank supported Kenya by the national utility KPLC to provide legal electricity connections. In slums, you might see that there are a lot of these illegal connections. There are a lot of these wires going in different places. So, through this project, they actually legalized a lot of these electricity connections and many of the new consumers also came in through this program. So, these are slums and where gang wars were very prevalent and it was very unsafe, et cetera. In fact, one of the KPLC colleagues were telling me that one time he went with a watch in the slums and by the time he came out of the slum, the watch was not there. And the women and the girls, they found it very difficult to move freely in the night because it was dark. There were a lot of gangs. It was very, very scary and unsafe for women and young girls. But once the light came on through this project and there were small shops run by women often for braiding. It is very prevalent in Kenya and East Africa. And girls felt much more empowered to go around and move around in the dark hours. And I felt so proud when I was there. I just felt that I could see young girls actually having a life in the evening hours. They could at least get out of the house and do something. Otherwise they were just stuck inside the house. And I just felt that this is really what development is. You are actually creating opportunities for these young women to do something with their life, have commercial enterprises, et cetera, and make money out of even the electricity connections that they have. So these are really examples where you see that how electricity access can change women's life. And not only older women but also young girls for their educational opportunities, et cetera, and also creating instances from them to make some money in income generation activities as well. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. Incredible story. So we have a time I think for just another round of questions. And then we already have some coming in from the audience and I hope those keep coming. But I wanted to just get a sense from each of you about specific examples of female leadership that you've really admired over the course of your career. I mean, I know I can say that I've learned from each of you in different ways. And I'm curious whether there was a specific role model or moment of leadership that stands out to you as an example of female leadership. And I will start with Lisa. Thanks, Katie. I've been struggling to choose between two. So let me just quickly say two. First, I've always admired Elizabeth Littlefield, who was the head of OPIC, now DFC. And then how she drove the bipartisan bill to increase DFC's remit or OPIC became DFC. I think she chairs M. Copa. I tried to get her to be on one of my boards but she was too busy, which I understand. And she also, I think, wanted to be more on a certain side of things, but I really respect what she's done. And then I also, because I'm taking two and I'm not allowed, but my boss at Actus, Lucy Hines, she's now the head of the energy group. So we just raised, you know, 4.6 billion for emerging markets, some developed markets investment. She's got four kids. She has spent 20 years in private equity, traveled like a crazy woman and really risen within a company. And it's such a also fantastic spokesperson for our firm that it's, I think, a rare pleasure to work for somebody like her. Awesome. And for this question of all questions, you're allowed to name two. That's okay. We'll allow it. Siddhasna, let's go to you. Yeah, I was thinking about it a lot that, you know, I have met many very inspiring women through my career in the World Bank, but one of them who stands out, especially in the energy access space is my friend, Dana Rishankova. Many of you know her. You know, she was the first task leader of her program called Lighting Africa. And it was a program, it was launched in 1999 with two pilot countries with Ghana and Kenya. So Lighting Africa was a program that really elevated these upgrade concepts into much of a reality in the later years. But believe me, in 99 in World Bank, nobody wanted to touch upgrade. Nobody wanted to talk about lighting. Nobody wanted, they thought it was completely marginal, completely irrelevant at that time. And it was definitely not a good thing for somebody's career, you know, to work on these upgrade concepts. But you know, Dana was really sort of persevered. And today, she's the global lead of energy access in the World Bank. Today, you know, everybody, all the energy specialists that we have in the World Bank work on Off-Grid. So it's really her contribution that made the World Bank really bring Off-Grid into the mainstream of our energy business. And I and so many of our colleagues really draw from her passion, commitment, and ambition to ensure energy access for all in Africa. As Radhika was saying, that we are all committed to energy access, sustainable energy goal to have energy access for all by 2030. But you know, the seeds of that had to be sown much, much earlier. So Dana is definitely one of those people who really did the groundwork. So we can really benefit from it today, tomorrow and until 2030. Hopefully the world will be a better place by 2030. Thanks to her. Great, thanks Sudeshna. And Radhika, last to you. Gash, I really struggled to think of a single specific person. When I was pondering this and kind of a series of women ran through my head and Dana was one of them actually. So Sudeshna, thanks for singing her praises. I think I still, you know, I'm not gonna name a single person because I think for me and in my career having a few really strong female mentors very early on was so instrumental to how I've developed as a professional. I think it was a couple of women who in very kind of ordinary, common ways have advocated for me and taught me how to, you know, raise my voice, how to hold my own even when I was the youngest or the most female in a room and nudged me to take on bigger opportunities than I thought I was ready for that built such a foundation for me in my career. And were so important when I then made the leap to Greenlight and started building a very early stage company and in very different parts of the world than I was familiar and where I was very often the only female in the room and very clearly an outsider. And so I think I share that, you know, kind of that it's these small seemingly simple ways that are really important, I think that have been really important for me and I think I try to keep in mind in now that I'm a leader in Greenlight and when I encounter women in our fields with competitors or just different parts of our industry that I think are so important is it's not the big heroic things but it's the small constant opening doors, you know, inviting people to speak and nudging people further in their path that, yeah, that really matter, have mattered to me. Great, thanks so much. So we are gonna move into a Q&A with the audience. We already have a bunch of really great questions coming in. I'm gonna start with one. Well, I'm actually gonna combine two questions. We've spent a lot of time talking about the off-grid space, both Sudeshna and Radhika have talked about that. There's a question about kind of what are the challenges on the on-grid side? And I'm gonna send that to Lisa but I'm gonna add on kind of not only what are the challenges and what should be the priorities in thinking about developing on-grid infrastructure but also how do you think about where the right balance is between where do we finance microgrids? Where does that make sense? Kind of what does the future look like that embraces all of those options? Thanks, Katie. I mean, I think first just on our kind of bread and butter large utility scale on-grid solar wind and gas generators. I think, you know, when we talk about Africa in 54 countries, each country has its own regulator, utility, ministry, you know, and set up. And most of those economies are on the smaller side and some of them have conflict issues as well. So in order to be able to write bigger equity checks we focus on roughly sort of the top 10 economies on the continent and still one of the issues is, you know, how many projects can you actually get done in the investment life cycle of a private equity fund? So and that could be a function of actually how much demand is in country and how much it's increasing and how much they need to procure the utility in order to meet that demand. It could be not getting all the different parties around the table on a least cost development plan to decide actually what kind of technology and where do they want to procure next. It could also be what we're facing now, especially with more renewables is the lack of grid build out to get to the regions that are resource rich, whether that's various sunny places in the Northern Cape and South Africa, whether it's hydro resources and DRC, they require hundreds of kilometers of new transmission lines, which in Africa generally are all still government owned and which requires long-term government concessional financing often from multilaterals which can take a decade. And so these are the things that can sort of limit the opportunity set but then sometimes it goes crazy, you know? I mean, South Africa just ran a bidding round for 2.6 gigs of wind and solar. In Egypt has procured thousands of megawatts of renewables. So you need to be kind of on the ground and opportunistic about which markets you're working in because if you just wait in one market for it all to happen it might have two or three projects in a year and that's it. But grid I think is becoming one of the biggest constraints. And on your question on micro grids, I mean, we've followed a lot of the different developments in the off-grid sector. And I think, you know, it's starting to take, it's starting to accelerate and a lot of that was held back by regulatory changes that were needed. And from our side, because we're kind of a larger scale investor so we need to write large equity checks, we are kind of dipping our toe now in the commercial and industrial space but things like micro grids, solar home systems are not our investment focus yet because of the scale. And so I think you find some of that is still requiring some multilateral backing to kind of get it to a scale where that makes sense for the private sector. I'll stop there. Yeah, thank you. And I think that's a great segue to Sudeshna too who's at an MDB. I'm wondering if you have perspectives on this Sudeshna. Yeah, thanks a lot, Katie. As you know, this is our bread and butter in terms of on-grid projects. We have to first acknowledge the fact that Africa which is the last bastion of unserved population which is over 600 million people live without electricity. Africa is different from any other region which has received electricity recently which is say South Asia or East Asia. Mainly because it's much more remote. The density of population is very, very, very scant in Africa compared to in South Asia. South Asia is the most densely populated part of the world. And as a result of that, the capital cost of on-grid electrification is much lower. It's about three times or four times lower in South Asia compared to in Africa. So you're essentially in a continent where the fiscal affordability is much worse than in South Asia and it costs higher. So that is a double-vane in Africa. So now what we have been doing and a number of the other donor partners have also been doing is a geospatial plan trying to figure out what is the economic financial way of reaching everyone in the country. And you realize there are some parts of the country where you can reach with grid because it's much more economically possible to do so. Some parts you can't reach with a grid where many grids might be more possible or maybe the off-grid solutions, market-based solutions can be more possible. So we have been doing a lot of this geospatial plan to really map out the countries and see almost like literally at the minute level to see what kind of economic possibilities exist in terms of reaching with specific solutions. The second point I wanted to make is the challenges. The challenges what you see in Africa is about the utility financial viability. This is something that Lisa was also talking about. We did a big study on utility financials in Africa and you realize that pretty much every one of them is bankrupt in terms of they do not meet their capital cost. None of them do and some of them meet their operational cost. And so that is really the situation. How would you bring up your investment capital to go for grid electrification if you do not even meet your operating cost? That is really the situation. So somebody has to pay for it. Either the government pays for it or the multilateral donor space for it. Otherwise electrification in Africa will not happen. And of course, you need to have the private sector to come in at scale to provide the resources that are required. And then the numbers that we come up with is about $25 billion a year in terms of looking at the entire value chain. It's a lot of money. And unless we have a situation where public sector, private sector really form a partnership to come together to come up with these kinds of resources, it's going to be 2030 is much sooner. It will take a lot longer than 2030 to provide electricity to everyone. Another thing we should not forget is that Africa is also where the population is growing at the fastest. So we are almost running really fast even to stay still because the population growth is much higher than the rate at which you can provide access. So that's why the number of unserved population is either increasing or remaining static. So yeah, it's a very complicated situation. Yeah. Yeah, thanks Sudashna. And Lisa, a bunch of people are interested in understanding how developing economies are doing on their kind of renewable energy and climate targets. And I know this isn't a focus of Actis, but you're sitting in South Africa, which is this really interesting case of a coal dependent economy that's also had hugely successful renewable energy auctions. I'm curious if you have perspectives either on South Africa's climate goals specifically or more broadly. Thanks, Katie. Let's see, on South Africa specifically, South Africa, it's fantastic renewable resources, solar and wind are natural here. And they also have a lot of land. And so compared to more population dense places, that's also not a constraint, grids a bit of a constraint, but the main constraint is political will more than anything else. So as we were talking about before, it's still, it's had a successful renewable program, but it's still, I can't remember the exact figure, but probably the 5% to 10% max of the generation mix is renewable and almost all the rest is coal or diesel. There's a tiny bit of nuclear. And so it has quite a long way to go and it could have gone further had it not been for the politics of coal mining here. And unfortunately, as Sudeshna was saying, most of the utilities around Africa are bankrupt and because their government owned have in the past been used by government sort of in political ways. For example, not being allowed to charge cost-reflective tariffs. So every kilowatt hour they sell, they lose money because it's politically not acceptable to charge too much for power. So this is, because of the debt situation that SCOM is in right now, that's the South African government owned utility, it's an opportunity to kind of twist the arm a little bit to push towards those climate goals. So I feel optimistic about that because they're really besides the politics, there's no reason they should be so behind in their goals. I mean, it was six years between, five or six years between renewables procurements and that was all politics. I think around the rest of Africa, it is the grids are much smaller. I mean, SCOM has about 40 gigawatts of generation whereas most other countries in sub-Saharan Africa are a gigawatt or two gigawatts total. So if you add in like a Turkana 300 megawatts of wind, it's a lot for these systems to handle in terms of the intermittency and in the fragile grids. So they sort of have less strong grids and strong feelings for them, you know, I mean versus South Africa where South Africa could have made a lot further strides. I think other countries are kind of doing what they can given their current situation, their current grid, their current ability to invest and the multilateral assistance will be helpful to underpin that. Great, thanks so much, Lisa. I have a fairly big and broad question here and I'm going to give it to Sudeshna. How do you see the transition to renewable, locally generated energy, changing the macro geopolitical balance? Actually, this is a very good question. And, you know, when I was mentioning, of course I get very passionate when I start talking about Africa's energy access. It's a topic that I have spent a large part of my career on. You know, when you think about the locally, I'm guessing the question is regarding the mini grids, you know, which is decentralized sort of renewable energy systems. And what happens as a result of that is it, there are some implications for the utilities, but there is also some implications not on the utilities, which is, which sort of protects it from fiscal imbalances. So for example, you have, there are a lot of mini grids which are, as you know, there can be isolated mini grids. And so they do not have any fiscal implications on the grid per se, yeah? So they are almost like companies which are operating by itself, you know, we are servicing the local consumers. And if there is a systematic way of doing it, then the government actually says, these are the areas, these are the sort of sites, please come in and create your sort of facilities. And you can charge the tariff that you want. Of course, there's a business model associated with it. The tariffs have to be at a certain level, et cetera. So there are various sort of transaction advisory services are usually provided to the government to make sure that such sort of allocations of sites to these renewable energy developers are made. By the same time, you know, as the grid goes further out, how do you sort of, these mini grids also have to be connected then to the grid. So then it becomes a fiscal imperative because they become connected to the grid. So we have to think about it almost in a continuum fashion, it's a dynamic situation that initially the isolated grids do not have any implications from a fiscal point of view. But over time, as they get connected to the grid, it can have a fiscal implication. But, you know, we have to think about it that this is something absolutely essential. Mini grids, I personally feel for rural livelihood, rural sort of economic development. It's absolutely essential to think about mini grids as a very important solution for commercial enterprises, for industrial enterprises. And then later on the grid can come in if they do at all. So. Thanks, Sudeshna. Time has flown. I think we have time for just one last question. There was some interest in the connection between energy provision and health facilities. I think clearly in the context of COVID, we've seen that and the importance of that. Radhika, I'm not sure if you specifically have worked on health facilities, but I'm wondering if you have perspectives on what that connection looks like and how we're doing. Yeah, it's definitely not a primary focus of our business because the solutions we've designed are really intended for households. They're, you know, kind of much smaller solar homes systems that can power lights, television, stands, radios, mobile phones, but not necessarily equipment for a hospital. And that said, a lot of hospitals or clinics are quite small outside of the bigger cities or even peri-urban areas. And so there are a lot of hospitals who face long power cuts and actually do use solar home systems, our solar home systems to keep light running in those long periods of power cut. Really important for delivering babies or just being able to safely take care of patients and check in on them. So, but yeah, I do think that the pandemic has highlighted the need for reliable energy at a much larger scale than we provide. Certainly across, you know, off grid or weak grid areas. And I'm definitely hearing a lot more conversations about that, which is encouraging because the need is not new. I think it's just coming to the surface now, right? As we've all become a lot more aware of the capabilities and limitations of healthcare systems. So yeah, while we don't address it directly, I'm optimistic about something more reliable and substantial, hopefully coming around to serve healthcare facilities. Great, thanks so much, Radhika. We've reached the end of our session. I wanna thank all of our incredible panelists for participating. And I also wanna thank Stanford and the other hosts for not only inviting us, but for showcasing the international side of these issues. It's incredibly important. So thank you so much. And with that Naomi, I'll turn it back to you.