10024404Resilience Fund: Additional COVID related costs to 105908 Uganda Minigrids and Anchor Loads projectClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKOur original project aimed to show how creating a Farmers' Enterprise Centre (which would include cold storage services, facilities for value-addition to crops like milling or juicing, and other agriculturally-related services) in a rural offgrid community in Uganda could act as an anchor load, improving the commercial performance of a minigrid in that community (ie make it more reliable and affordable), whilst at the same time improving the incomes of the members of that community, making it easier for them to afford to pay for the electricity, and also engage in more new entrepreneurial activities and catalyse development of the community more generally. This will give us a technology and business model which will allow us to more rapidly roll out energy access technologies to offgrid agricultural communities, while at the same time creating more economic opportunities and development in those communities, leading to more sustainable and long-term development impacts. Through the project to date we have been adapting the technology and business model, so that it is now even more attractive to communities and funders, and can be implemented in a more rapid fashion. Our estimate is that by using our technology, farmers can increase their incomes three-fold, and the cost of electricity and electricity services in the community should be greatly reduced compared with other approaches. This resilience fund project is to support us with unanticipated costs relating to COVID and the need to complete system construction and installation before the end of the financial year, due to COVID-related funding considerations. This will allow us to complete the systems for the communities to test, and allow us to continue to gather the data required to validate the approach, and move forward to the next phase of scale-up, and being able to supply these solutions more widely.