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Jessica Ognibene is Director of Account Management at Odyssey Energy Solutions, where she has spent nearly a decade designing and running financing programs for distributed energy across emerging markets. Since joining in 2017, she has overseen the implementation of more than 50 financing initiatives spanning mini-grids, solar home systems, productive use of energy, and clean cookstoves—resulting in clean energy access to over 20 million people.
June 2026 | The distributed renewable energy sector — motivated by the imperative to achieve universal energy access — has spent years asking one question: how do we connect more people? That question drove billions in investment and produced a generation of innovative companies. It was the right question for its time.
But the sector has matured, and with maturity has come a harder insight: connecting people and improving their lives are not the same thing. Achieving the second requires doing two things at once — accelerating connections, and raising the bar on what those connections actually deliver.
A new generation of large-scale financing programs has taken that lesson to heart. Initiatives like Mission 300, and programs like DARES, DECIM, and ASCENT, are not simply deploying capital at greater scale. They are changing how connections are financed, how success is measured, and how energy access translates into lasting improvements in livelihoods. Odyssey has supported four million connections on the platform — a milestone that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. What makes it meaningful is what the sector is learning to do with that scale.
The programs that are getting this right are doing three things differently: flexibly funding technology types that fit communities, verifying sustained power and ownership, and embracing cross-sector collaboration rather than operating in isolation.
Flexible Funding Is a Sign of a Maturing Market
For most of the sector's history, funding was structured around a simple premise: money flows in, new assets get built, connections get counted. That model made sense when the priority was establishing a baseline of infrastructure where none existed. It makes less sense when millions of systems are already in the ground — some thriving, some underperforming, and many capable of serving far more customers with the right investment.
Programs are increasingly recognizing this. Rather than requiring entirely new buildouts, funders are now supporting rehabilitation of existing systems, expansion of mini-grids to reach adjacent communities or additional customers, and more flexible technology mixes including mesh-grid approaches that can adapt to local conditions. This shift reflects a more honest accounting of what high-impact deployment requires. Sometimes the most effective path to serving more people runs through an existing asset, not a new one.
CEI Africa offers an early example of this thinking in practice, supporting mini-grid expansion so that systems already generating power can reach more customers without starting from scratch. Renewvia extended a refugee settlement mini-grid in a similar spirit, ultimately reaching around 14,000 refugees after the initial infrastructure was expanded. DECIM in Madagascar has pursued rehabilitation and extension alongside new connections. The pattern across these examples is the same: developers and country programs are being given the flexibility to ask what a market needs, rather than fitting real-world complexity into a narrow template.
This matters beyond operational efficiency. With SDG7 universal energy access by 2030 growing harder to reach, and Mission 300 alone targeting more than half of the 667 million people still without electricity, the sector cannot afford to leave functioning infrastructure underutilized. Flexible funding is not a concession — it is a recognition that impact-oriented capital should follow impact, wherever it is most likely to be found.
The Shift from Point-in-Time to Long-Term Verification
A connection counted on the day of installation is not the same as a household with durable energy access. This distinction, long acknowledged in principle, is finally being built into program design in meaningful ways.
The challenge is significant. In solar home system markets where incentives have pushed companies to deploy their products at any cost, churn rates can be alarming. When that happens at scale, the risks compound: stranded assets, retrieved equipment, resold systems, and grant funding that produced short-term metrics without long-term outcomes. In regions where multiple programs operate simultaneously, the risk of double-counting and inflated impact claims adds another layer of concern.
The answer is not to abandon pay-as-you-go models, which have been transformative in reaching low-income customers. The answer is to use the data those models generate more intelligently. Payment behavior — repayment rates at 30 days, 60 days, and beyond — is already a well-established proxy for long-term ownership, as GOGLA's latest PAYGO Perform framework has formalized. What the sector now needs is for financiers and implementing organizations to treat this data not as a reporting artifact but as a live measure of whether impact is sustained.
Some programs are already moving in this direction. DARES includes a bonus payment tied to consumption — 30 kWh per customer — which requires continued use rather than a one-time installation. OMDF and OGEF have tracked expected versus actual payments at six months, with additional disbursements tied to customers meeting a specified minimum threshold. DECIM is building on similar logic. The direction of travel is clear: programs that reward lasting outcomes are producing more durable impact than those that stop measuring once the connection is logged.
Cross-Sector Collaboration Is No Longer a Nice-to-Have
The third shift is perhaps the most underappreciated. Scaled energy programs create the most value when they are designed to enable adjacent outcomes — and the strongest adjacency, by far, is telecoms.
The relationship runs in multiple directions. Telecoms infrastructure depends on reliable energy; energy systems depend on connectivity for monitoring and remote management; and customers who gain energy access use it, in significant part, to charge the phones and devices that connect them to economic opportunity. These dependencies make energy and telecoms natural partners, yet for much of the sector's history they operated in parallel rather than in coordination.
That is starting to change. IHS Towers represents a commercial model of cross-sector collaboration, partnering with developers to support telecoms infrastructure while generating additional revenue streams that improve project economics. ASCENT, operating in Sudan, is using results-based financing not only for energy but for digital devices and connectivity — a striking example given the country's circumstances and a signal of how seriously the development community now views digital access as an energy co-benefit. DECIM includes significant work across both digital devices and telecoms as part of its core design.
The broader implication is that the sector is evolving from a single-sector delivery model toward something more integrated. Programs that connect communities to clean energy and simultaneously expand their access to communication, commerce, and digital services are building the kind of ecosystem resilience that makes energy access stick.
What Scale Requires
The programs that will define the next decade of distributed renewable energy are not simply the biggest ones. They are the ones that have figured out what lasting impact requires: funding structures flexible enough to match real-world conditions, verification systems honest enough to track outcomes beyond the installation date, and partnerships broad enough to multiply the value of every connection made.
Counting connections got us here and we need to continue full steam ahead to reach the SDG7 targets. What comes next demands more — and the sector, at its best, is already showing what that looks like.
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