Our Story

Virunga Power was formed in 2011 as a developer, investor, and operator of renewable power projects and rural distribution grids. Our focus is on building and operating utility-scale projects across East and Southern Africa and beyond with a goal of bringing high-quality, low cost power to rural communities that currently lack reliable access to modern energy.

The "Virunga" name is inspired by the Virunga Mountains, a volcanic, mountainous region that stretches across the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The trans-border Virunga region is famous for its wildlife and national parks, but outside of the protected reserves it is also one of the most densely populated rural areas of the continent. Despite abundant renewable resources for power generation, electrification remains very low, leaving the local communities reliant on traditional biomass and kerosene for energy and causing additional stress on the environment. This region exemplifies the regional and continent-wide opportunity to enable sustainable economic development for the local communities by bringing clean, low-cost power through rural utility projects.

As we conceive it, a private rural utility is a collection of distributed energy generation and electricity grid distribution infrastructure that is financed independently from a national grid and sometimes, but not always, is physically and operationally independent as well. We serve rural customers with high-quality, low-cost grid power following the ‘Tier 5’ standard of grid power that can be used to unlock growth in the local economy through the agricultural value transformation chain and any other commercial and industrial development use in that region. The Virunga Power rural utility model is based on the premise that rural power consumers are credit worthy and electric utility projects that sell power to rural communities can attract investment from traditional private-sector infrastructure investors, such as pension funds and project finance banks.

Our team is made up of experienced development, operations and construction engineers, finance and legal professionals, health, safety, environmental and social (HSES) experts, and rural community development experts. We are supported by an extensive network of advisors and partners that work together with us to implement our scalable and sustainable model for rural electrification on the African continent.

Our Mission

Our missions is the build the leading rural electric utility company in sub-Saharan Africa and to continuously strive to bring the full benefits of electrification to new communities and consumers in a sustainable manner

ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL

We are building permanent infrastructure that is essential to meaningful and productive rural economic development and can help create food security and fuel broader economic prosperity locally and regionally. In doing so, we strive to minimize localized ecological impact and maximize positive social and environmental outcome. Our projects are also designed to take untapped local renewable resources and turn them into a locally-owned and managed economic resources, providing significant social benefit.

In addition, it is our goal to ensure full compliance with a variety of domestic and international frameworks designed to protect the environment and the interests of affected local communities.

For our Environmental and Social Policy and Exclusion List, please feel free to access here.