In Ethiopia 56% of the population, over 60 million people, have no access to electricity. They use kerosene lamps, dry cell batteries, and fuel wood as their main source of energy. These energy sources do not provide adequate lighting and worse are harmful to their health and the environment. Aside from lighting, energy from grid and off-grid sources is vital to power irrigation, agro-processing and other commodity value added services. Households with solar irrigated facilities harvest twice or three times a year more, doubling their productivity and income. Expanding energy access to households at a rapid pace is required to help them benefit from these opportunities. Key barriers identified by the report include intermittent supply of SAS products into the regions due to lack of FOREX for Private Sector Enterprises (PSE) to be able to import these products. Disparate rules and regulations required by each region for PSEs to sign to be able to access the consumer financing facility extended by MFIs to distribute their products has increased firms’ compliance cost. High penetrations of substandard products in the regions have also made it difficult for quality certified products to compete in the regions. Several recommendations are made in this report
to overcome the identified barriers.
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