Promoting Women in the Green Economy

We believe social enterprises can play a key role in tackling climate change. Often those exceptional enterprises face a significant lack of appropriate funding options, which hampers the growth of their ventures. Therefore, we offer grants up to € 150.000 over 1.5 years for social enterprises to unlock their growth potential. Besides capital, we provide access to business support services to strengthen the organization based on their individual needs.

Are you a social entrepreneur focusing on climate solutions and based in Kenya? Are you looking for an opportunity to scale your impact and grow your business sustainably?

The epScale Funding Call 2022 will back social enterprises in Kenya, which have a positive impact on the environment, while creating more jobs and economic opportunities in the green economy. We seek to support ventures, which care about Gender Equality and take intentional action to address the issue.

We can only consider applications, which meet the below minimum criteria:
- Your organization must be registered and operationally active in Kenya
- Your company must have officially been in operation for at least two years
- Your company must have had at least 150.000 EUR (19,000,000 Kshs) revenues in at least one of the last three financial years. Grants can be included but need to be listed separately (enterprises with a stronger earned income stream vs. grants will be preferred)
- Your social enterprise must fulfil at least one of the following criteria:
  1. Your enterprise has at least one female (co-) founder who is currently still holding a senior leadership position
  2. Female employees account for 50% or more of all employees
- There are no pending litigations against your enterprise or members of its management team
- Your founding team has good knowledge of the Kenyan market (founders with Kenyan residency would be a plus)
The epScale Funding Call focuses on social enterprises with a positive environmental impact, providing solutions for the following sub-sectors:
- Sustainable energy for productive use (e.g. water treatment and filtration, pumps, cooling, grinding, processing)
- Sustainable energy solutions (e.g. new energy storage solutions such as battery charging, microgrid solutions, smart energy infrastructure, clean cookstoves)
- Education, skills, or vocational training initiatives for clean technologies (e.g. trainings for companies and organisations on how to use clean technologies, climate change adaptation, how to reduce carbon emissions)
- Waste management and/or recycling technologies (e.g. circular economy approaches, eco toilets, smart waste bins, solar powered trash compactors, recycling robots)
This is not a comprehensive list. Please reach out to us if you are not sure whether your sector(s) fit(s) the criteria.