Lighting Global

completed

Lighting GLobal is the programmatic support infrastructure underpinning IFC's off-grid lighting programs globally. It represents the best practice learnings of the Lighting Africa pilot. Building on the success of the Lighting AFrica pilot, IFC is replicating the Kenya pilot across AFrica (in partnership with the World Bank) and into Asia and MENA. As IFC expands its work in this area, the activities which are common across all country programs are coordinated and managed through Lighting Global. These include the product quality assurance function, the support for a self-sustaining industry association (GOGLA), collaborative relationships with global industry, multi-lateral, and NGO partners, and efforts to establish with the industry end-of-product life recylcing and disposal systems to address the new waste stream created by proliferation of solar devices. Central to Lighting Global will be a strategy of building the institutions in the market which can take on the roles that IFC has played in catalyzing this nascent global market. Thus, Lighting Global will manage a process for spinning off ownership of the Lighting Global product quality standards, and the testing and certification of products, to a consortium or institution with the technical capacity, global footprint, and insitutional mandate to administer quality assurance for the growing industry in a sustainable way. Lighting Global will also provide the institutional support with knowledge tools and quality assurance to ensure the appropriate design and successful implementation of IFC's growing portfolio of country off-grid lighting programs in Africa, Asia and MENA. As the learning hub, Lighting Global will support capacity building within the World Bank Group and across the Sustainable Energy For All network. It will also enable efficient delivery of IFC's country programs by connecting country teams to ensure sharing of tools, expertise, personnel, and experience, between program teams.