About This Fund
The Energy Access Relief Fund (EARF) is a blended-finance debt facility established in 2020 as a coordinated multilateral response to the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on emerging-market off-grid energy companies. Co-anchored by the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO, the UK's CDC Group (now British International Investment), the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), with philanthropic backing from the Rockefeller Foundation and Shell Foundation, EARF deployed up to $100 million in concessional loans to small and medium-sized enterprises providing off-grid energy solutions across approximately 50 countries in Africa and Asia.
The fund targets off-grid energy service companies—providers of solar home systems, clean cookstoves, and solar-powered irrigation—that were commercially viable before the pandemic but faced acute liquidity stress when payment collections from low-income rural customers collapsed during COVID-19 lockdowns. By providing low-cost debt at below-market rates, EARF helped these enterprises retain field agents, service their own debt obligations, and preserve the energy access gains achieved over the preceding decade—preventing years of progress on electrification from being undone by a temporary demand shock.
EARF's blended-finance structure—combining official development assistance grants, development bank balance sheet capital, and commercially structured tranches—served as a proof-of-concept for coordinated multi-DFI crisis response in the off-grid energy sector. The fund invested across the off-grid solar, clean cooking, and productive-use agricultural segments, with portfolio companies in East Africa, West Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. It is classified as an impact investment vehicle with explicit SDG alignment, particularly SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy) and SDG 13 (climate action), and represents an early example of blended finance at scale in the energy access market.