Australia Mekong Partnership on Environmental Resources and Energy Systems (AMPERES)

Finalist 2017

The Australia-Mekong Partnership on Environmental Resources and Energy Systems, (AMPERES) uses investments in mini grids to catalyze community led development in rural Viet Nam. The partnership initiative, known as the CORE Initiative and its members known as the “CORE Coalition”, represents a consortium of renewable energy, private sector, civil-society and research community actors. In Viet Nam, despite impressive and rapid expansion of the grid network over the past three decades, more than 280,000 households remain off-grid in the remote mountains, island and deltas. To address this, AMPERES combines state-of-the-art technology in renewable energy generation, storage and smart-metering with new payment mechanisms, empowered, inclusive community development planning processes, and micro-loans that help communities catalyze home-grown enterprise development. The CORE Initiative couples this with a public-private revolving fund facility and an enterprise development incubator- ensuring the scalability of the CORE initiative from commune to commune across the remaining “energy-poor islands” of Viet Nam, and ultimately the wider Greater Mekong Region.