Energy 4 Impact is Mercy Corps’ energy platform, working to accelerate progress toward a more sustainable, climate resilient and equitable future for all. The platform’s goal is to accelerate advancements in achieving universal, sustainable modern energy, leveraging its potential to tackle critical development and humanitarian challenges. Energy 4 Impact empowers communities to confront climate change head-on, all while maintaining momentum towards crucial mitigation objectives.
Toward this vision, Energy 4 Impact brings to bear a combination of multidisciplinary expertise, local know-how, and systems-centred approaches, coupled with global best practices in energy innovations, technologies, and business models. Energy 4 Impact drives impact across two complementary pillars: building and facilitating inclusive energy markets, and leveraging these markets to enable climate-resilient, low-carbon development in emerging and fragile economies.
Through this powerful combination, Energy 4 Impact is advancing food security, economic opportunity, water security, and peaceful, effective governance in the world’s most vulnerable communities. From farmers using solar irrigation for growing food in the face of droughts, to women entrepreneurs growing their businesses with off-grid electricity, Energy 4 Impact work collaboratively across sectors and communities to find new and transformative ways for clean energy to improve life on our planet for all people.
Since 2015, Energy 4 Impact has been a key partner of ENERGIA in implementing the Women Economic Empowerment programme in Senegal. Their initiative, Foyré Rewbé (meaning “woman and energy” in the local Wolof language), has progressed through three phases, impacting thousands of women and their communities.
In the initial phase, the programme supported women entrepreneurs as distributors of domestic clean energy products. The second phase helped entrepreneurs develop income-generating activities using solar energy, strengthening financial ecosystems, accelerating financial inclusion, and developing technology-based solutions and viable business models for green growth.
The current phase, extending until March 2025, promotes the productive use of energy in sectors with strong women representation, such as dairy, livestock, fisheries, market gardening, and rice and banana production and processing.
Foyré Rewbé 3 identifies opportunities for value addition through clean energy across various stages of selected value chains, including processing, production, transformation, packaging, and marketing. The goal is to empower women to join the workforce, establish businesses, and contribute to economic development.
Aligned with Senegal’s energy transformation plan targeting universal electrification by 2025 and a 40% renewable energy share by 2035, the project also aims to shape policies that remove barriers to women’s economic participation. It seeks to foster equal opportunities for women to harness clean energy, drive local economies, and promote climate-smart socio-economic development.
