Zambia
Ecovolt empowers rural Zambian communities to co-own solar mini-grids, earning income and sharing profits through a digital cooperative energy ownership model.
Scaling
1-3 years
$100,000.00
Last update: October 05, 2023
Across sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 600 million people remain without access to electricity, with the majority living in rural communities. In Zambia, approximately 62% of the rural population is off-grid, depending on charcoal, kerosene, or diesel generators for basic energy needs. These sources are expensive, unreliable, and environmentally destructive.
Over the last decade, the renewable energy sector has gained momentum, with solar mini-grids emerging as a viable solution for powering off-grid areas. However, while these projects successfully deliver energy access, they often fail to address a deeper structural issue: who owns and benefits from the energy infrastructure.
In most cases, the solar assets are owned by private developers, NGOs, or international financiers. Communities that depend on the electricity remain end users, not stakeholders. The result is that the economic value generated by rural energy consumption flows outward, reinforcing inequality rather than reducing it.
The central challenge Ecovolt aims to address is the concentration of ownership and capital within the renewable energy sector, which perpetuates wealth disparities between energy developers and local communities.
While mini-grids power households and businesses, the profits and decision-making power lie elsewhere — in urban centers, donor offices, or investor portfolios. Rural people remain consumers of energy, not participants in the wealth it generates.
This imbalance limits community agency, creates dependency, and hinders long-term sustainability. When people do not own what they use, they cannot fully protect, reinvest, or innovate around it.
The scale of this problem extends beyond Zambia:
Across Africa, over 25,000 mini-grid projects are planned or operational, most owned by external entities.
Less than 5% of rural energy assets involve any form of local ownership or profit-sharing.
Average rural electrification costs in Zambia remain 30% higher when communities are not involved in ownership or management, due to weak accountability and maintenance issues.
Gender inequality compounds this problem—women and youth are the main users of household energy but rarely participate in decision-making or financial governance.
In economic terms, this means billions of dollars in renewable energy investments risk reproducing the same exclusionary systems that fossil fuels created—where benefits are privatized and communities remain marginal participants.
Economic Leakage: Revenue from rural energy sales is extracted to repay investors or foreign operators, preventing local capital accumulation.
Limited Resilience: Without ownership, communities have less incentive or capacity to maintain and expand infrastructure.
Missed Opportunities for Wealth Creation: Rural users could generate passive income through energy dividends, but such mechanisms are absent.
Social Inequality: External control of local infrastructure perpetuates power imbalances, reinforcing urban-rural inequities.
Policy Blind Spots: Most national energy frameworks prioritize electrification rates, not wealth redistribution or community equity.
Financing Gaps: Conventional investors seek quick returns, discouraging inclusive ownership models that prioritize community profit-sharing.
Regulatory Constraints: Many African legal systems lack frameworks for community-owned utilities or cooperative energy governance.
Technological Barriers: Tools for transparent tracking of local investments and dividends are limited, reducing trust in shared ownership.
Lack of Awareness: Communities often view themselves as consumers, not co-owners, due to historical patterns of top-down development.
Ecovolt’s work in Senanga and Mwembeshi has made this challenge tangible.
In Senanga, over 60 farmers now irrigate crops using solar power, yet none hold ownership in the infrastructure generating their electricity.
The Mwembeshi mini-grid powers a college and community businesses but remains an external asset, even though its profits are community-generated.
This imbalance inspired Ecovolt to explore how ownership and wealth can be localized without compromising operational sustainability.
Wealth redistribution in the context of renewable energy is not only about equalizing income but also democratizing access to productive assets. In the energy sector, redistribution could mean:
Giving rural communities equity stakes in local grids.
Creating investment channels where small contributions yield collective ownership.
Sharing profits transparently through digital systems.
Allowing communities to decide how reinvested profits support local priorities (e.g., schools, health clinics, or farming tools).
However, such models remain underexplored in Africa, largely due to the absence of prototypes demonstrating feasibility.
The Hacking Wealth Challenge offers a catalytic opportunity to shift the paradigm from energy delivery to energy ownership.
Ecovolt’s proposed cooperative model directly tackles the wealth redistribution gap by:
Turning passive users into active co-investors.
Ensuring every kilowatt-hour sold circulates value within the local economy.
Creating transparent, digital mechanisms for dividend management.
Building legal frameworks for community participation in renewable infrastructure.
This approach not only redistributes financial returns but also transfers power, voice, and governance to the people historically left out of economic systems.
By addressing energy ownership inequality, Ecovolt’s model contributes to multiple systemic transformations:
Economic Empowerment: Creating community shareholders accelerates local savings and investment culture.
Climate Justice: Aligns environmental sustainability with social equity by ensuring that clean energy benefits flow to those most affected by climate change.
Governance Innovation: Demonstrates how technology can decentralize decision-making and enhance accountability in shared infrastructure.
Gender and Youth Inclusion: Prioritizes marginalized groups as co-investors, ensuring equitable participation in a new green economy.
True wealth redistribution is not about charity it’s about structural transformation.
Ecovolt’s cooperative model reframes clean energy not just as a service but as a shared asset. In doing so, it begins to correct historical imbalances in ownership and control that have defined the energy sector for over a century.
When rural communities can earn from the energy they use, they gain financial independence, resilience, and dignity. The social multiplier effect where profits are reinvested locally creates a cycle of empowerment that conventional top-down models cannot achieve.
Ecovolt envisions a future where:
Every solar panel in rural Zambia doubles as a community wealth engine.
Households become stakeholders in the nation’s green transition.
Digital tools democratize investment opportunities for even the poorest families.
Renewable energy becomes not only a solution to poverty but a vehicle for equity and ownership justice.
The challenge Ecovolt seeks to address lies at the intersection of energy poverty and wealth inequality. While electricity brings light, it does not automatically bring inclusion. To truly transform lives, the systems that deliver energy must also deliver ownership, agency, and financial returns to the people they serve.
Ecovolt’s cooperative energy model is designed precisely for this transformation redistributing wealth, decentralizing power, and humanizing the clean energy transition across rural Africa.
Ecovolt Innovations Zambia is a renewable energy social enterprise bridging the gap between clean energy access and economic inclusion. After piloting two successful solar mini-grids in Senanga (Western Province) and Mwembeshi (Central Province), Ecovolt identified a persistent gap: while communities now have power, they do not own the systems that sustain their livelihoods.
The proposed solution transforms this reality by developing a community cooperative ownership model—a mechanism that enables local residents to become co-investors and profit beneficiaries in Ecovolt’s solar mini-grids. Through this approach, Ecovolt is redefining wealth creation in rural Zambia by turning consumers of energy into shareholders of the infrastructure that powers their communities.
In most rural electrification projects, energy systems are financed by donors or private investors, leaving local users as perpetual customers. This structure reinforces dependency and external capital control. As a result:
Rural people benefit from energy access but not from asset ownership or profits.
Economic leakage occurs, as wealth generated by local energy consumption flows outward.
Communities remain financially excluded from the renewable energy value chain.
Ecovolt’s model challenges this paradigm by introducing distributed energy ownership—ensuring that the people using the power also own a share of its generation and revenue.
The Community Cooperative Energy Ownership Model integrates three key innovations:
Micro-Investment Mechanism: Households, farmers, and small businesses purchase affordable “energy shares” or contribute small savings to co-own local solar mini-grids.
Profit-Sharing Structure: Revenue from energy sales is distributed transparently through dividends or cooperative savings, ensuring that community members gain financially from each unit of power consumed.
Digital Platform: A transparent, user-friendly digital system that tracks investments, dividends, and governance decisions—building trust, accountability, and accessibility.
This model ensures that every household connected to the grid is both a customer and an investor, transforming energy access into a sustainable wealth redistribution tool.
Ecovolt uses a human-centered design approach involving local communities, cooperatives, and traditional leaders. Through participatory workshops:
Members co-create ownership rules, share structures, and dividend distribution models.
Gender-inclusive processes ensure that women and youth have equitable representation in cooperative governance.
Community input shapes the digital platform’s features and usability, enhancing trust and adoption.
A core component of this project is the design and testing of a prototype digital platform that will:
Register members and track their equity contributions.
Display transparent financial performance (revenue, expenses, and profit).
Automate dividend calculations and distributions.
Facilitate decision-making through digital voting and community forums.
The platform will be co-developed with local ICT innovators, ensuring it is accessible on low-cost mobile devices and in local languages.
Ecovolt, working with cooperative experts and legal advisors, will draft a cooperative constitution outlining:
Membership eligibility, rights, and obligations.
Profit-sharing ratios and reinvestment provisions.
Transparency and accountability procedures.
Dispute resolution and member representation mechanisms.
The framework will align with Zambia’s Cooperative Societies Act and Energy Regulation Act, enabling compliance while maintaining flexibility for innovation.
The project will include an action research component to assess feasibility, risks, and impact potential. This involves:
Financial simulations of profit-sharing models.
Social acceptance studies on cooperative ownership.
Gender analysis to ensure equitable participation.
Comparative review of cooperative energy models globally.
Research findings will inform national policy advocacy and be shared openly with other African innovators.
Ecovolt will pilot the model on its Senanga mini-grid, engaging at least 20 households and small businesses as cooperative investors. Activities include:
Member training on cooperative governance and financial literacy.
Testing of the digital platform and user onboarding.
Simulation of dividend payouts and performance tracking.
The pilot will serve as proof of concept for scaling across Zambia’s off-grid communities.
Ecovolt will document the learning journey through research briefs, workshops, and digital storytelling.
Key advocacy goals include:
Promoting policy frameworks that enable community-owned renewable energy infrastructure.
Encouraging integration of cooperative financing into national electrification strategies.
Sharing open-source tools and guidelines with peer organizations across Africa.
A validated prototype of a cooperative digital investment platform.
An operational community cooperative owning part of the Senanga mini-grid.
Documented evidence of wealth redistribution through shared profits.
Increased financial literacy and empowerment among participating households.
A replicable policy and technical framework for community-owned renewable energy.
This initiative reimagines how wealth is generated and shared in the clean energy sector. Ecovolt’s approach goes beyond electrification—it creates a circular economy where power consumption translates into local financial growth. By embedding equity participation into renewable energy systems, the model redistributes not only electricity but ownership, income, and decision-making power.
The project also contributes to global discussions on energy justice, cooperative economics, and inclusive financing, aligning strongly with the Hacking Wealth Challenge’s vision of empowering innovators to hack wealth for social good.
Upon successful validation, Ecovolt aims to:
Replicate the model in five additional communities across Zambia.
Partner with regional cooperatives to establish a national community energy network.
Leverage the digital platform for cross-border cooperative investments in renewable projects.
In the long term, Ecovolt envisions a decentralized energy economy where rural Africans are no longer passive consumers but active wealth creators and co-owners in the transition to clean energy
Ecovolt Innovations has already demonstrated strong, measurable outcomes through its renewable energy deployments in rural Zambia, paving the way for inclusive energy ownership and local wealth creation. Below are the key outcomes achieved to date:
Ecovolt successfully installed two solar mini-grids in Senanga (Western Zambia) and Mwembeshi (Central Zambia), providing sustainable electricity to over 500 households, small enterprises, and a local learning institution.
In Senanga, the mini-grid supports domestic power use, irrigation systems, and small agro-processing enterprises.
In Mwembeshi, the mini-grid powers Mooto College of Business, enabling digital learning, night study sessions, and better educational outcomes.
These installations have reduced reliance on firewood and diesel generators, lowering energy costs and carbon emissions.
Access to reliable solar power has allowed smallholder farmers to irrigate crops year-round, reducing vulnerability to droughts and erratic rainfall. Farmers have diversified into high-value horticulture, improving household income and food security.
Over 60 farmers in Senanga now use solar-powered pumps to irrigate maize, vegetables, and rice.
This has led to increased yields by 40% and created seasonal employment for youth in farming cooperatives.
Ecovolt’s mini-grids have stimulated microenterprise growth by powering shops, barber salons, maize mills, and welding workshops.
Local entrepreneurs now have longer business hours and reduced operating costs.
A baseline survey showed a 30% increase in local income levels among participating SMEs after one year of electrification.
This demonstrates how access to clean energy can serve as a catalyst for community-led economic transformation.
At Mooto College of Business in Mwembeshi, consistent electricity has transformed the learning environment:
Students can now study at night and access digital learning tools.
Teachers use projectors and online resources, improving the quality of instruction.
In Senanga, electrified schools and training centers are improving literacy and ICT skills among youth and women.
Ecovolt actively prioritizes inclusive participation in its operations and training programs.
55% of users of the Senanga grid are women-led households or enterprises.
Youth have been trained as solar technicians, data collectors, and system operators, building local capacity for maintenance and employment.
The project has created over 25 green jobs across installation, monitoring, and maintenance.
Ecovolt has formed partnerships with:
Mooto College of Business (for entrepreneurship training and data collection)
Local cooperatives and councils (for community engagement)
Energy regulators and NGOs (for compliance and capacity building)
These collaborations have enhanced governance, accountability, and technical oversight, ensuring sustainability of mini-grid operations.
By replacing diesel generators and charcoal-based lighting, Ecovolt’s mini-grids have reduced CO₂ emissions by approximately 420 tons annually.
They have also contributed to forest conservation by lowering firewood dependency.
Solar-powered irrigation supports climate-smart agriculture, helping farmers adapt to Zambia’s increasing climate variability.
Ecovolt’s participatory approach has cultivated community trust in renewable energy systems.
Through workshops and consultations, residents expressed strong interest in owning shares in the infrastructure. This led to the design of the community cooperative ownership model, now being developed under the Hacking Wealth Challenge.
This readiness for local ownership forms the foundation for wealth redistribution and long-term sustainability.
The next step enabled by the Hacking Wealth Challenge is to test a cooperative financing and profit-sharing model where households invest micro-amounts into energy assets and earn dividends from monthly revenues.
The groundwork has been laid through:
Feasibility studies on local investment appetite.
Consultations with legal experts on cooperative frameworks.
Preliminary UI designs for a digital platform to track member investments.
This outcome positions Ecovolt as one of the first African startups linking renewable energy access with financial equity redistribution.
Ecovolt’s pilots have produced data and insights that inform policy dialogues on decentralized energy and inclusive finance.
Findings are being shared through policy briefs, university collaborations, and innovation networks to influence national strategies on community-owned renewable energy.
Ecovolt’s work has moved beyond energy delivery it is redefining how rural electrification can redistribute wealth, empower communities, and strengthen resilience.
The cooperative ownership model represents a replicable innovation with potential to scale across Zambia and Sub-Saharan Africa, aligning with global goals for clean energy, inclusive growth, and climate action.
