HETA is a USAID Global Development Alliance (GDA), a powerful mechanism for activating private sector expertise and resources toward sustainable development objectives. As a GDA, HETA starts with four founding partners—Abt as the lead; RESOLVE, an NGO specializing in alliance building; bechtel.org (Bechtel’s social enterprise), providing social infrastructure expertise and co-investment; and Orange, HETA’s first telecommunications partner supporting our work in countries where our priorities align.

Our five-year goal is to reach 10,000 health facilities across the region. Funding for the GDA amounts to $47 million from Power Africa and USAID missions, intended to launch implementation efforts and catalyze strategic partnerships that will meet the overall funding need (an additional $100–150 million) to achieve this ambitious target. Unlike other USAID GDAs, where partnerships are set from the beginning, HETA is an open platform with space for many contributors from the donor, private for-profit, and non-profit sectors.

Together with our partners, we are delivering funds, technical assistance, and in-kind resources to design, install, operate, and maintain renewable energy systems linked to mobile or internet networks for thousands of health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa.

HETA’s approach seeks to solve a long-standing sustainability challenge for health facility electrification—namely, securing financing, establishing sustainable business models, and providing technical expertise to provide long-term operations and maintenance (O&M) of the energy and digital connectivity systems after they are installed. We customize our approach to suit the needs and context in each country (down to the facility level), designing “energy as a service” models in contexts where energy and telecommunications companies are ready to partner with health facilities, so the health system pays for the electricity used, not the equipment. In other areas, we are exploring community-led models in which women entrepreneurs and other local organizations co-design O&M funding models with HETA.

Where feasible, HETA seeks to facilitate partnerships that will enable sales of surplus power to businesses and families in the surrounding communities. Such arrangements help generate revenue for system O&M, supporting financial sustainability. This approach also opens the door for a range of productive uses of energy, from ensuring the facility’s ability to run state-of-the-art medical appliances to providing power for mobile charging stations or pumps to deliver clean water.