OVERVIEW OF
SPARK+ AFRICA FUND
Spark+ Africa Fund is a $64 million impact investment fund that invests in scalable, next-generation companies offering clean, modern distributed energy solutions for cooking to the mass market in sub-Saharan Africa.
The fund is a partnership of public and private sector investors. Development Finance Institutions include African Development Bank’s Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA), Denmark’s Investment Fund for Developing Countries (IFU), the Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries (BIO), the European Commission, and the US Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Foundations and family offices include Ceniarth, Osprey Foundation, Fundacion Netri, and the Ashden Trust. Four major pension funds have also invested in Spark+, including the pension fund of leading insurance company Baloise Group, and GastroSocial, the pension fund of the hospitality industry, both in Switzerland.
The fund’s portfolio companies benefit from multiple sources of complementary Technical Assistance (“TA”) via its TA partners Stichting Modern Cooking and the Clean Cooking Alliance, an initiative of the United Nations Foundation.
Spark+ was developed with support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs via the Clean Cooking Alliance, and the International Climate Finance Accelerator sponsored by the Government of Luxembourg.