Publications

Are you an entrepreneur or a start-up looking to build your brand and marketing strategy? This publication by our Marketing and Communications Manager Joy Rukundo is for you. She explores the true essence of marketing, the differences between value, strategy, branding, and marketing, and why it’s crucial to separate these elements for success. Learn how to build a strong brand identity and align your values with your marketing efforts to stand out in a competitive landscape.

How much funding goes into startups in sub-Saharan Africa, that are female-led? And how are women entrepreneurs mastering their way through the climate sector to secure investment? Persistent collaborated with Rahel Kosch, a graduate student at IMC Krems University of Applied Sciences in Krems, Austria, on her Master's thesis, "Women Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Strategies for Women to Overcome the Gender Gap in the Climate Supportive Sector."

In our new publication "Is it Time for a Solar Receivable FinCo?" Persistent team members Chris Aidun, Eva Stolz and Léa Bougern analyze the challenges the PayGo sector has been facing and propose a transformative solution. 

On October 26th Persistent hosted it´s very first Climate Venture Building Conference in Nairobi. The full day event was an example of Persistent´s commitment to a collaborative approach to accelerate the development of climate positive sectors, contributing to strengthening that venture ecosystem. It was the first time in the 10 years of Persistent history that we brought together our partner company leaders from across Africa, and exposed them to our shareholders, team members and other Persistent partners and friends. The aim was to not only showcase the great work Persistent strives to do, but also to allow exchanges among Persistent’s many constituents and to create more cohesion among everyone in the Persistent family.

As a climate venture builder, we believe that the move to a greener transportation sector will be vital to Africa’s sustainable development, particularly for its polluted urban centers where transportation often accounts for almost 50% of CO2 emissions. In this publication, we share the results of a simple analysis to support our own e-mobility market selection journey.

This case study, led by Persistent Venture Builder Manuela Bock, takes a deeper look into the success story of Altech, the partnership with Persistent, its expansion and growth, their impact on the ground, and their vision for the future.

Persistent, like many others, thought that pay-as-you-go off-grid solar as a subsector of energy access would reach profitability and hockey stick growth within 5-7 years. That has not happened. This publication not only provides insights from our learnings but also a lot of good news!

Developed in collaboration with USAID Power Africa and Persistent, this Financial Modeling Tool is designed to guide and enable internal financial management processes, modeling key aspects of PAYGO companies, enabling projections of company financials based on a set of different scenarios and introducing different methods that can guide company valuation.

At the beginning of this year, Persistent decided to take a fresh look at our assessment of our impact. Although Persistent has a clear vision and approach, and a clear understanding of our basic impact on people and climate, we aspire to follow best practices. This has led to our examination of those practices and, as result, this white paper.

Due to the fact that the clean energy access sector has an exceptionally large impact narrative, we believe the sector also has a particular responsibility to provide quantitative evidence of its impact – all while taking into account cost-effectiveness. Impact assessment is in need of unified global standards, and transparency and accurate data collection is an essential part of reaching these standards. This report intends to provide insights into how we track our impact indicators, which metrics and methodologies we use, and what our limitations and visions are.

At the GOGLA Forum in Nairobi six active lenders to PAYG companies - SIMA, SunFunder, responsAbility, OIKO credit, Lendahand and CDC Group - shared their lessons learned and provided an outlook on the sector. This short report is a structured summary and reflection on the key points that came up.

This paper presents a Business Analytics Toolkit that provides a methodology to assess the performance of a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar company’s portfolio of consumer receivables.

In this paper, Shell Foundation and Persistent explore why the PAYG sector is perceived as lagging, our view of what is happening and why. It will also explore what the sector needs to remain on track to reach maturity and SDG7’s promise of energy access.

We describe how securitization can work in the DESCO sector, providing basic structure, terms and pricing theory.

This paper looks at the growing need of Distributed Energy Services Companies (DESCOs) to secure working capital financing for growth.

In response to a piece written by Ceniarth’s Greg Neichin, Diane Isenberg and Mary Roach, we welcome the views of an investor that looks at this promising sector with a critical eye, but are compelled to explain why we strongly disagree with their analysis.

In this article we assess the state of the market and attempt to forecast the amount and types of capital needed, focusing on the stages of growth of a DESCO and the potential macro market demand.

Distribution, reaching customers with products or services, is an underestimated challenge to providing access to energy to low income off grid people.

This paper, in conjunction with a forthcoming paper that provides a more in-depth look at distributed energy service companies (DESCOs), provides a picture of our understanding of this market and the businesses that we believe will expand to serve it at scale within the next decade.

This thought-piece focuses on a technology-agnostic, market-driven approach to rapidly scaling-up the availability of rural energy services that we believe, with the right conditions, could efficiently and cost-effectively reach somewhere close to 500mm people over the coming decade.

The ABC model consists of building energy generation infrastructure designed to serve both anchor loads (e.g. cell phone towers) and rural, off-grid households.

This paper is a practical guide to typical currency risks and general mitigation strategies in the energy access sector. It is intended for Distributed Energy Services Companies, their equity investors and lenders.