Can access to electricity help bring peace?

Automating impact measurement across the portfolio 

Approximately 700 million people today do not have access to electricity. Many of them live in fragile regions and have to deal with conflict, climate impact and extreme weather conditions, etc.

To build sustainable energy infrastructure in these regions is not an easy task. We are proud to partner with Energy Peace Partners (EPP) to support them in their efforts to provide energy access in hard-to-reach areas. Working together with EPP, we automated their multidimensional impact measurement system, which shows the effects of energy access on the overall level of peacefulness in communities.

The customer: Energy Peace Partners

EPP operates at the intersection of climate change and peacebuilding, focusing on linking climate solutions with vulnerable regions around the world. Their mission revolves around leveraging renewable energy to foster stability and development in conflict-affected areas. EPP developed the Peace Renewable Energy Credit (P-REC), a groundbreaking financial instrument designed to accelerate renewable energy adoption in unstable areas, which helps to finance and support high-impact renewable energy projects and project developers. P-RECs promote sustainability and generate tangible socioeconomic benefits, including improved health, education, and economic stability. We have since seen the completion of P-REC funded projects and helped them collect and analyse community-level data in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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The challenge: gathering high quality impact data efficiently

One of the main value propositions of the P-REC is the social and peace impact that comes with gaining access to clean electricity. However, quantifying and communicating this socioeconomic impact is difficult. While energy output is easily measurable, assessing the broader social benefits poses a challenge. Transparently conveying this impact to corporate buyers, who seek credible sustainability investments, is paramount to EPP. They require a robust methodology to measure, verify, and report the multifaceted benefits of P-REC supported projects to maintain trust and accountability.

EPP’s Director of Impact, Dr. Andrea Abel van Es, is an expert in monitoring and evaluation with a PhD in Political Science from Stanford and vast experience in peace-building initiatives. She had created a custom framework based on the Positive Peace framework by the Institute of Economics and Peace, to quantify and measure the social and peace impact of P-REC supported projects.

Transforming this new framework into a sustainable monitoring and reporting system posed a significant challenge that would require a substantial investment.

The solution: automated survey design, data processing, visualisation and reporting through leonardo

By working with leonardo, EPP digitised their impact framework and are now able to conduct the full impact monitoring process much more quickly. leonardo provides EPP with a comprehensive solution for collecting, analysing, and reporting on the social and economic impact of their renewable energy projects, particularly:

• Integrating the Positive Peace framework and EPP’s Theory of Change into leonardo, while aligning it further with acknowledged standards like the Sustainable Development Goals and impact reporting best practices
• Preparing surveys for data collection based on EPP’s framework with the click of a button 
• Processing and validating data automatically rather than manually in Excel and R
• Visualising data for ongoing impact monitoring, management and reporting

"leonardo provides a user-friendly, verified, and easy to understand solution to measuring and reporting on our projects and the impact we are contributing to in the neediest communities globally. You don't have to be a stats genius or IMM expert any more to understand your impact and to create transparency both internally and externally. I couldn't imagine scaling our IMM work without this exact kind of solution."

Dr. Andrea Abel van Es, Director of Impact, Energy Peace Partners

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First insights and the way forward

Data is now streamlined across multiple projects and accessible through the leonardo dashboard. Insights into poverty, food insecurity, well-being, income and gender inequalities, education, motivation to migrate, and most importantly, levels of peacefulness at the community level, are now readily available. This information will help EPP to gain a better understanding of the challenges and priorities facing the populations where P-REC funded projects are located, as well as to understand how P-REC-financed projects change socio-economic conditions over time.

In this way, leonardo significantly reduces the time and cost to measure, monitor and report on impact. Furthermore, as an independent entity, we are able to validate the data, ensuring its reliability as an external third party. Thus, P-REC buyers can be assured that the impact of their investment has been verified and be confident in sharing this with customers or stakeholders.

As EPP continues to drive positive change in vulnerable regions, leonardo stands as a trusted partner, empowering them to amplify their social and environmental impact while fostering global peace and sustainability.

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