Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet announces Oscar A. Garcia as Chief Impact Officer

LONDON | 11 May 2023 – Today, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) announces Oscar A. Garcia as its new Chief Impact Officer.

This appointment marks a significant milestone for the Alliance, which was launched at COP26 to accelerate green energy transitions and renewable energy solutions in emerging economies worldwide, while addressing climate change and economic development. Oscar will sit as part of the GEAPP Leadership team. 

With more than 25 years of experience in leading areas of strategic planning, evaluation, learning and results-based management, Oscar joins GEAPP from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations’ lead agency on international development, where he served as Director of the Independent Evaluation Office.

While at UNDP, Oscar was responsible for providing strategic direction, thought leadership and credible evaluations in advancing UNDP’s work to help countries achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. For example, he oversaw programmatic and thematic evaluations in Africa, Asia and Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Oscar has also served across three UN agencies in senior management roles and has championed agriculture and rural development, environment and natural resource management, poverty reduction and human development. Most notably, he was responsible for leading the performance evaluation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), with a portfolio of $6.9 billion, invested in rural development projects operating in 98 countries.

“As demonstrated over a long and illustrious career, Oscar brings the invaluable experience needed to leverage data, evidence, and analysis that will enable our renewable energy transition work to go further, faster”, says Simon Harford, GEAPP’s CEO. “GEAPP’s mission demands we push boundaries to support the transformation of energy systems, embracing risk and failure. This is only possible if pursued in parallel with rigorous monitoring, learning, and knowledge sharing. These insights will be crucial to inform the Alliance’s decision-making and to reach our shared goals of carbon emissions reduction, and the expansion of energy access, and sustainable livelihoods across emerging economies.”

“Addressing energy poverty and the climate crisis with clean energy is both an immense challenge and opportunity”, says Oscar Garcia. “I am honored to join an organization that has already taken great strides in tackling the deep inequities of energy poverty while addressing climate change. It is my priority to ensure we continue to make meaningful and positive change through the development and implementation of a rigorous and strategic monitoring, evaluation and learning framework that will allow us to measure the impact of our initiatives and projects on the ground and track progress against our strategic goals. The window of opportunity for decisive action is narrowing fast and GEAPP offers a genuine chance  to make a difference for the planet and its people.”

Over the coming year, the Alliance will deepen its working relationships with governments across Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, with an initial focus on seven countries: South Africa, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, DRC, Ethiopia and Vietnam. Priorities in 2023 include dramatically reducing the cost of, and increasing accessibility to clean energy technologies.

About the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet: The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is an alliance of philanthropy, governments in emerging and developed economies, and technology, policy, and financing partners. Our common mission is to enable LMIC’s shift to a clean energy, pro-growth model that accelerates universal energy access and inclusive economic growth, while supporting the global community to meet critical climate goals during the next decade. As an alliance we aim to reduce 4 gigatons of future carbon emissions, expand clean energy access to one billion people, and enable 150 million new jobs. With philanthropic partners, IKEA Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Bezos Earth Fund, GEAPP works to build the enabling environment, capacity, and market conditions for private sector solutions, catalyze new business models through innovation and entrepreneurship, and deploy high-risk capital to encourage private sector solutions, and assist just transition solutions. For more information, please visit www.energyalliance.org and follow us on Twitter at @EnergyAlliance.

Contacts 

Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet:

Eric Gay

+1 917 912 6190

eric.gay@energyalliance.org