B7: Hard Talk: What more is needed to close the financing gaps for locally led companies?

The session is intended to candidly reflect on the need for differentiated investment approaches from early-stage grants to commercial investments targeted at locally-led companies across various markets. The off-grid solar sector has made significant progress, however navigating the capital spectrum continues to be particularly challenging for locally led companies. The conversation will explore how actors on the investment continuum like early-stage grant funders can take investors along in the company’s journey and vice versa. Thereby exploring hard questions such as whether expectations are aligned around investment readiness, should every business conform to traditional notions around scale, inherent tensions around tradeoffs between impact and returns, is there a dearth of tailored & context-relevant TA packages. Recognizing that not everything is possible, it will also touch upon the limits and shortcomings of investor and grant development programs in the continuum spectrum.