We did it! Sharing determination + sunshine

By Allison Archambault

I’ve waited a long time to be able to share this joyous news. 
 
Recently in Haiti, six mayors from across the country’s southern peninsula signed contracts to bring electricity to their towns. Combined, the six new grids will bring reliable electricity to over 28,000 people. 
 
The moment was years in the making and represents a pivotal step forward for an ambitious government initiative to energize Haiti’s rural communities with 24/7, solar-powered electricity service. It also serves as a powerful illustration of the herculean perseverance of dozens of Haitian civil servants working tirelessly through extremely challenging circumstances to push progress forward.
 
Globally, the clean energy revolution will be realized with exactly this kind of grit and pragmatic optimism. Policy, processes and permitting take time and an enormous amount of effort to get done. The glory of flipping of a switch follows the grind of the deals and the documents.  
 
Multi-year processes yield “buckets of documents” 
 
Let me paint a picture for you.
 
In Haiti, the official meeting log between the Ministry of Public Works’ Energy Cell team and the EarthSpark team documents forty-five meetings, each over an hour long, spanning more than two years. The official meeting records do not capture the countless iterations of spreadsheets and contracts that passed back and forth during negotiations, parallel deliberations with the energy regulator, coordination with the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Finance, the Haitian public procurement office, or the extensive liaising with multi-lateral financial institutions like the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, which are both financial supporters of the government’s microgrid program. 
 
The result? Six grid contracts, each totaling over 250 pages, each printed in 8 hard copies: nearly 16,000 physical pages of contract documentation. During the signing ceremony, each mayor was called to sign and initial his pile of contract documents.  For Earthspark, Jean Thaylord, our director of microgrid operations in Haiti,  was required to sign or initial every  single  page . Of all 8 hard copies. Of all six contracts.
 
Our EarthSpark team – now disbursed across the world – kept checking in on him.
 
“Jean, ARE YOU OK? How is your hand holding up?!!” We were all gleeful and grateful that this moment had finally arrived.
 
Jean made light of the effort, laughing that it was a sacrifice he was happy to make given all everyone had done to get to this point.

With Jean’s and the mayors’ signatures, the documents were ready for the final signature from the Minister of Public Works to make them official. Ministry officials carefully loaded the signed documents back up into the giant Tupperware tubs that would be used to fly them back to Port-au-Prince, avoiding the land routes that are controlled by gangs.
 
The minister added his signature a month later. It’s official.
 
Getting to this point—in the midst of government upheaval, violent gang activity, and sustained community hardship—was a mind-bendingly long and staggeringly complex process involving every layer of institutional hurdle. And we did it!

Jean Thaylord and five of the six regional mayors are seen here in the regional capital of Jérémie where they spent hours signing packets of contracting documents.

Three tubs - over 300 pounds of freight - traveled with Ministry of Public Works officials by airplane from Port-au-Prince to Haiti's South and back, flying over the most dangerous areas of terrestrial gang control.

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Haitian heroes – doing the work for systems change
 
As much effort as the EarthSpark team put into this, the heroes here are the Haitian public servants who got this done. Diverse teams across agencies persevered, daily, through extremely difficult circumstances – sometimes risking personal security just by going to work – to navigate complex rules and processes to build a new rural energy program from scratch. The amount of time and effort to get these first six grid contracts signed is both outrageous and inspiring. In the face of enormous challenges, people kept pushing and did the work.
 
The EarthSpark team is extremely proud and honored to now have a formal public-private-partnership with these 6 municipalities and the Ministry of Public Works in Haiti to build these next new grids. 
 
“We’ve now earned the privilege of implementation challenges” is what I keep repeating to my team. Building the grids will not be without challenges. But now we are at the starting line and able to run with the plans we have been building for years.  
 
People across many international institutions also made this moment possible. “The Haitian government, through the [Ministry of Public Works] Energy Unit and [energy regulator] ANARSE, would like to thank the donors, the World Bank and IDB, for financing the mini-grids, as well as [EarthSpark's Haitian subsidiary] Enèji Pèp La, the company in charge of implementing and operating these infrastructures in 6 regions of the country: Marfranc, Beaumont, Dame-Marie, Anse d'Hainault, Chambellan in the Grande-Anse Department and La Cahouane, a locality in the Tiburon commune in the Sud Department. There's no doubt that the development of these 6 mini-grids will help to boost sustainable development indicators in the target regions,” shared Mr. Léonidas Davoust, Coordinator of the Ministry of Public Works’ Energy Cell, who has been a lynchpin of institutional coordination for this effort.
  
“Blended Finance” for Long-term Sustainable Infrastructure
 
One exciting element of these next six grids is that they will be the first built under EarthSpark’s Haiti microgrid scale-up plan that uses project finance and blended finance – a term that means pooling together different types of grants, loans, impact investment, and user fees – to build long-term, community-based, clean energy infrastructure with sustainable operations. 
 
If you have ever contributed to EarthSpark, you are an important part of making this all possible! I look forward to keeping you apprised on the efficacy of this model and how it increases the impact of individual giving – which seeds the whole process like a grain of sand in a pearl.
 
Planning for a Fire Recovery + Reboot
 
Not all the news has been good. One year and one week ago, a fire interrupted operations of EarthSpark’s second-ever solar grid in Haiti, launched in the town of Tiburon in 2019. Since the fire, we have been working on raising funds for the recovery and relaunch. Thank you SO much to those who have contributed to this effort. We’re happy to share that we have tentatively secured funding for the full rebuild and relaunch. We are working hard to finalize the support, and our goal is to relaunch Tiburon before we launch service in any of the new towns. 
 
Alongside the great achievement of contracting and closing the financing for the next six grids, the new blended finance model I describe above is also expected to help us to improve the speed of repair for future grids.
 
Our team has been outspoken about the need for robust planning and resources dedicated to operations and maintenance of microgrids, but for our first two grids in Haiti, we did not have sufficient resources to build in redundancy or reserve funds. For these next grids we do.
 
Catalysts for Transformation in Rural Haiti
 
Let me close with how I opened: in awe of the many hands and unyielding determination that have enabled the first page (or the first ~16,000 pages!) of a new electricity future to emerge in Haiti.
 
The entire EarthSpark community of readers and supporters—alongside countless individuals from Port-au-Prince to rural Haiti to Helsinki to the Green Climate Fund in South Korea—together, we have achieved something many doubted could be done.
 
For these six new grids, so far, we just have documents and funding pledges. But soon – working with Haitian engineering and construction firms who will bring the heavy equipment and build the new systems – we will have solar panels, and poles and wires, and electricity.
 
And we are just getting started. Behind these first six communities, another 17 towns have proposed EarthSpark grids that have been provisionally approved through this same program. Now that the processes have been built and the template documents have been ratified, we are highly hopeful that the acceleration will be swift.
 
When asked about the significance of this milestone, Dr. Evenson Calixte, Director of the Haitian Energy Regulatory Agency (ANARSE), who has been deeply involved since the program inception, reflected, “Clean energy is essential for Haiti's development, and these six new concessions* are a testament to ANARSE's unwavering commitment to sustainable progress. Mini-grids are more than infrastructure - they are catalysts that will drive social and economic transformation across rural Haiti.”
 
I’m boundlessly grateful to everyone reading this who has helped to power this effort.
 
Thank you for being part of this community and part of this movement.
 
Please share this story with one person you know today as a kind reminder that progress is possible even in the face of great challenges.
 
 
*In this context, “concession” means a government contract with a private entity to perform a specific activity for the public good. It’s a common term in utility governance, but I’m clarifying here since when I say “concession” in normal conversation most folks think I’m referring to some sort of a capitulation or a popcorn stand. :)