Energy Sector Management Assistant Program (ESMAP) Annual Report 2023

Main Report | Annexes 

2023 marked ESMAP’s 40th anniversary. Founded in the early 1980s to turn recommendations of the World Bank’s Energy Sector Assessment Reports into concrete measures for implementation by oil-importing developing countries, the trust fund has expanded over four decades to provide practical advice and seed funding for governments and World Bank teams to increase energy access while transitioning to a low-carbon economy.  

Today the world has many of the technological capabilities in place to create low-carbon energy access for all. Therefore, in FY2023 (July 2022 to June 2023), ESMAP focused on devising and supporting financial solutions that help make energy access and transition projects viable for commercial players while helping to put policies in place that encourage private sector participation.  

The report highlights key initiatives in this regard such as ESMAP’s global Hydrogen for Development Partnership (H4D), launched in 2022 at COP27 in Egypt, which facilitates capital-intensive hydrogen investments along with knowledge sharing and capacity improvements. Also in the fall of 2022, the World Bank—informed by ESMAP’s expertise and supported by its grant money—launched the Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-Up (DARES) Platform. Under it, the World Bank stared Nigeria DARES to connect some 18 million Nigerians with quality access to electricity through distributed renewable energy. The second program under DARES, Accelerating Sustainable and Clean Energy Access Transformation (ASCENT), was also prepared with ESMAP support and aims to bring electricity to 100 million people in up to 20 countries across Eastern and Southern Africa over the next 7 years.

As in previous years, the report provides overviews of ESMAP’s 7 pillars (main program areas) and summarizes key results across its 29 windows (programs), followed by a financial review of the year.