Energizing Women and Youth in Agri-Food Systems (EWAS)

Energizing Women and Youth in Agri-Food Systems (EWAS) provides young women and youth farmers in Africa with solar-powered tools to reduce losses and increase incomes, showing how clean energy can drive agricultural growth.

Key Facts

Despite their critical role in feeding the continent, African women - up to 60% of the agricultural workforce (UN Women, 2024) - face significant barriers to accessing energy and modern agricultural tools.

Africa’s agriculture uses only 2% of the continent’s electricity, forcing farmers to rely on rain-fed farming and manual processing. This increases climate vulnerability, reduces yields, and limits earnings.

Up to 40% of produce is lost each year due to a lack of access to reliable refrigeration or efficient storage (World Resources Institute, 2024). These losses waste billions of dollars, reduce farmers' incomes, threaten food security, and increase CO₂ emissions.

Ethiopia and Nigeria were selected as the program's initial focus due to the opportunity presented by energy access programs, the central role of agriculture in their economies, and the tremendous size of their rapidly growing populations.

Download 2026 RFP

By 2030, there will be 375 million young people in Africa’s job market. Agriculture is their biggest opportunity for work – it employs nearly half of sub-Saharan Africa’s workforce, two-thirds of them women – yet the sector uses only a tiny fraction of the continent’s electricity.

As a result, farmers rely on rain-fed farming and process their harvests by hand. Women and young farmers are concentrated in the lowest-paid, most labor-intensive work and between 30–40 percent of the food produced in the region is lost or wasted each year, partly due to the lack of refrigeration and storage.

EWAS is a three-year (2024-2027) partnership between the Mastercard Foundation and Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. It expands access to solar-powered productive use of energy equipment such as mills, cold storage and processing tools. It also strengthens agricultural value chains and builds resilient enterprises that sustain jobs for young women and youth. The equipment goes where clean energy can most directly reduce post-harvest losses, raise incomes and cut drudgery.

The program starts in Ethiopia and Nigeria where agriculture is central to the economy and populations are growing fast. During its first phase, EWAS will enable 17,000 young women and youth into dignified and fulfilling jobs and improve the livelihoods of 136,000 people. In doing so, it will demonstrate that clean energy and agricultural transformation can advance together.

EWAS by the numbers

Jobs to be enabled

17,000

Livelihoods to be improved

136,000

EWAS in action

EWAS expands access to solar-powered equipment, strengthens agricultural value chains and builds resilient enterprises that generate dignified and fulfilling jobs for women and youth.

Working through coordinated local partnerships, EWAS delivers three integrated interventions:

Subsidizing affordable productive use equipment through results-based financing,
Integrating these solar-powered tools into agri-food value chains with accompanying market access and business training
Providing business support to productive use companies to better serve their customers.

How systems change happens

EWAS creates an enabling environment for sustainable economic inclusion by pairing simultaneous action on energy supply and energy demand. It allows young women and youth farmers to move out of low-value, labor-intensive activities and demonstrates how local agri-food systems can be transformed.

By lowering the upfront cost of equipment through the Productive Use Financing Facility, EWAS removes a critical financial barrier and shapes the market. Embedding productive use equipment within existing agri-food value chains – alongside training, market linkages and farming business support – ensures that access to equipment translates into income gains. At the same time, business support strengthens the equipment-producing companies, creating more reliable service networks and long-term market sustainability.

Get involved

Support the next generation of financing and delivery models that can make productive use equipment more affordable and accessible for young women and youth, strengthen markets, and translate clean energy access into jobs, incomes and economic opportunity.