Prospect – advancing data-driven decision-making for energy access in Africa
Across Africa’s fast-growing energy landscape, decision-makers face a persistent challenge: fragmented and unreliable data. The growing demand for real-time, verified insights to plan, finance and monitor sustainable energy solutions has revealed a clear “bankable data gap” – a need for trusted, interoperable and transparent systems capable of serving both public and private actors.
Prospect was designed to fill that gap.
As an open-source digital public good, Prospect provides a secure, collaborative and future-ready platform that helps governments, financiers and energy companies turn data into actionable intelligence. It enables users to automatically collect, harmonise and analyse data from any modern sustainable energy solution – unlocking evidence-based decision-making and facilitating financing at scale.
Developed by the Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) in partnership with GET.invest, and co-funded by the European Union, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, Prospect supports a wide range of technologies – including grids, mini-grids, stand-alone solar, productive use appliances and clean cooking solutions. It seamlessly integrates data from diverse sources such as smart meters, IoT devices, mobile money and other digital platforms, ensuring a unified and verifiable view of sector performance.
Powering large-scale coordination and results tracking
Prospect’s flexibility makes it a cornerstone for energy programmes. It hosts the regional digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (dMRV) platform for ASCENT, a World Bank/COMESA programme aiming to provide 100 million people with clean energy across over 20 Eastern and Southern African countries. Through Prospect, progress is tracked in real time according to each country’s results framework, improving visibility for governments, financiers and implementers alike.
Countries such as Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi have already adopted Prospect as their dMRV platform, using it to visualise energy access progress, streamline reporting and deliver actionable insights for policy and investment planning.
Empowering energy companies and entrepreneurs
For solar companies such as SunGate (South Sudan), NalaPayGo (Lesotho), Oolu Solar (Burkina Faso), Chromevolt (Nigeria) and Vitalite (Malawi), Prospect provides a robust dMRV platform to monitor sales and maintenance, while facilitating access to inventory finance through streamlined reporting. Its open-source framework offers African entrepreneurs and start-ups the flexibility to develop customised solutions, creating further economic opportunities across the continent.
Driving research, learning and impact
Prospect also supports long-term research and development, from monitoring fossil fuel generators in Nigeria to assess renewable alternatives, all the way to evaluating clean cookstoves in Uganda to encourage adoption and tracking energy use in rural health centres to optimise systems across sub-Saharan Africa. By connecting data across these contexts, Prospect strengthens the evidence base for policy, innovation and investment.
A digital public good for Africa’s energy future
Through its open-source, licence-free and collaboratively governed design, Prospect ensures transparency, efficiency and data sovereignty across the energy ecosystem. By bridging the “bankable data” gap with trusted and interoperable public-good digital infrastructure, Prospect enables data-driven decisions that advance SDG7 and accelerate a just, inclusive energy transition. As adoption grows across governments, financiers and enterprises, Prospect is setting a new benchmark for how shared digital infrastructure can power Africa’s clean energy future.
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