Havenhill, others get $2.3m grant to power 245 public facilities

Clean-tech utility and energy access company, Havenhill Synergy Limited, has been awarded grant funding from Power Africa through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for the electrification of 50 primary healthcare facilities in Oyo State, Nigeria.

Report showed that about 60 per cent of healthcare facilities in Africa do not have access to electricity and of those that do, less than 30 per cent have reliable access to electricity.

For these healthcare facilities to deliver quality and efficient services, access to reliable electricity is important.

Similar to the grant funding received by the company in 2020, the funding is expected to boost the scale-up of the solar and energy storage systems to additional 50 primary healthcare centres in Oyo State using the energy-as-a-service business model. In addition, Havenhill will be injecting substantial equity & debt as counterpart funding alongside this grant provided by Power Africa in order to electrify the healthcare facilities.

Speaking about the grant, the Chief Executive Officer of Havenhill Synergy Limited, Olusegun Odunaiya, said, “this is a win for the industry and the healthcare facilities to be electrified. We are excited for this scale-up phase of our Energising Healthcare Initiative that will enable over 700,000 patients yearly to receive better healthcare service.

“We are grateful for yet another opportunity from the Power Africa team. We are delighted to further contribute to the improvement of the Nigerian health sector through the provision of reliable electricity that would aid the work of medical practitioners and caregivers and also impact the lives of those within the communities.”

As part of their Energizing Healthcare Initiative, Havenhill said it is committed to deploying clean-energy solutions to bridge the energy gap and improve healthcare service delivery across the country.

In the past two years, the energy access company has deployed over 1MW of solar-hybrid systems across rural, peri-urban and urban healthcare facilities in South-West and South-South Nigeria.

14 Tertiary Healthcare Facilities in South-South Nigeria were electrified under the ‘COVID-19 and Beyond’ programme under the World Bank and African Development Bank Group-funded Nigeria Electrification Project.

Havenhill will share the $2.3 million grant with four other companies with competence in healthcare facility electrification (HFE) — Aptech Africa, D.Light, Equatorial Power Ltd., and Solar Works B.V to electrify 245 off-grid healthcare facilities in Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.