Electrified and Exposed
How Currency Risk Is Choking Sub-Saharan Africa’s Clean Energy Transition

Convened by

Churchill Agutu
Early-Career Fellow 2025–2026

Panelists

George Appiah
SolarTaxi, GH

Tobias Ruckstuhl
Persistent Africa Climate
Venture Builder (ACV) Fund

Céleste Tchetgen Vogel
eWAKA Mobility, KE

Details

Venue & accessibility info: Meridian Hall, Collegium Helveticum

This is a public event. Participation is free of charge.

Please register here your interest in attending the panel before May 27. 
The organizer will reach out to confirm your participation. 

Currency risk* is undermining the clean energy transition in many sub-Saharan African countries. The pressure is most acute for privately financed off-grid electrification and electric mobility—technologies that can close both the electricity access and motorization gaps, but where investments are made in hard currency while revenues are earned in local currency. Their capital-intensive nature makes them acutely sensitive to financing costs, which have risen sharply in recent years, driven in large part by currency risk.

This panel brings together impact investors, energy companies, and public financiers deploying capital across sub-Saharan Africa to examine what is at stake if the currency challenge goes unaddressed—and what can be done to address it. Four questions will structure the conversation: how currency risk constrains scalability; how energy companies are navigating the uncertainty it creates; what financing solutions are emerging; and how investors and developers can unlock affordable capital in a volatile macroeconomic environment.

* We note that Africa’s currency landscape spans dollarized economies, FCFA-pegged regimes, and floating currencies, and that currency risk plays out materially differently across these contexts.

Program