ASCENT Digitalization Platform – COMESA Regional Energy Access Acceleration Platform (REAAP)

Why Digitalization Matters

Digital technologies can significantly accelerate progress in energy access and climate action. They help governments and private providers work faster, more transparently, and at lower cost by improving ……..Read more button planning, monitoring, reporting, and the overall management of energy-access programs.

Across Eastern and Southern Africa, businesses and energy providers are increasingly adopting digital tools—such as mobile-enabled payments, IoT sensors, real-time data platforms, and remote monitoring systems. This shift toward digital operations generates valuable data and strengthens service delivery, creating a significant opportunity for COMESA and ASCENT countries to build an efficient, interoperable, and scalable digital ecosystem for electrification.

What ASCENT’s Digital Platform Offers

ASCENT is establishing integrated, end-to-end digital architecture that countries can adopt fully or selectively depending on their needs. The platform brings together data, tools, and systems that support the entire project cycle —from early planning to verification and results reporting and carbon monetization.

It gives precedence to widely adopted digital tools that exhibit the highest degree of compatibility and interoperability potential with other relevant Read more …….software currently applied by businesses and governments in the region. While this architecture is promoted at the regional level, individual countries can adopt it flexibly, either in its entirety or selectively, based on their specific requirements and existing systems.

Three Core Application Areas

Geospartially informed Energy Planning

Geospatial electrification planning uses geographic data and spatial analysis to help energy planners to identify where people live, understand energy demand, and determine the most cost-effective solutions whether grid, mini-grid, or standalone solar to expand energy access efficiently and strategically. [Read more]: Geospatial technologies, including GIS software, satellite imagery, and digital data platforms, are transforming energy access planning across Africa. Countries such as Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, and Uganda are increasingly using geospatial analytics and digital tools to develop least-cost electrification strategies that support informed decision-making. By combining spatial modelling with demographic, infrastructure, and economic data, these solutions help identify the most suitable and cost-effective energy options for communities and institutions. ASCENT aims to build on these advances by promoting integrated and effective approaches that improve planning outcomes and support sustainable energy access planning across countries.

Tender and Contract Management

Streamlining procurement processes and contract administration for energy access projects across the region. [Read more] [read more]: Digital process management solutions are transforming procurement and contract administration by replacing paper-based procedures with secure digital platforms. Tools such as e-tendering and online contract management systems improve efficiency, transparency, and accountability by enabling real-time communication, centralized data storage, automated workflows, and secure document management. These platforms streamline the full project lifecycle — from tender publication and bid evaluation to contract execution and payment approvals — while creating clear audit trails that strengthen governance and compliance. Advanced analytics further support decision-making by generating insights from project and contract data. When integrated with MRV and other digital systems, these solutions enable seamless tracking, verification, and management of project implementation, helping organizations deliver faster, more transparently, and more effectively.

Digital Ecosystem for Electrification

Real-time tracking and verification of project outcomes, ensuring transparency and accountability throughout implementation. [Read more] [read more]: Digital MRV is at the centre of ASCENT’s digital ecosystem, as it enables to move beyond simply tracking connections to monitoring actual usage and service sustainability. By automating data collection and verification, these digital MRV platforms improve accuracy, transparency, and cost-efficiency, while enabling faster results-based financing and access to carbon markets. They integrate information from multiple sources—sensors, Consumer Relationship Management (CRM) databases, mobile payments, and more—creating harmonized, reliable data for monitoring, planning, regulation, carbon credit issuance and monetization, and investment decisions. With digital MRV, energy providers and agencies can identify trends early, optimize program design, and demonstrate performance to stakeholders with verified, trustworthy data.

How ASCENT Supports Countries

COMESA’s digital tool promotion strategy is grounded in inclusivity, relevance, and sustainability. All countries, whether already involved in ASCENT or exploring future participation, are eligible for support. COMESA assists countries at different stages of their digitalization journey—from assessing needs and setting up solutions to piloting and scaling them for greater sector impact.

Scoping – Help countries identify their needs and potential solutions
Designing – Harmonize practices
Piloting – Empower national stakeholders
Scaling – Sustain improvements and share knowledge

COMESA acts as the regional integrator, ensuring compatibility across countries and supporting capacity building, best-practice sharing, and long-term sustainability.

Key initiatives to date

Regional dMRV platform: The ASCENT Program supports large-scale electrification across 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, making a strong regional MRV system essential. Progress is tracked nationally and consolidated through a centralized regional digital MRV platform managed by COMESA. For countries using different MRV tools, COMESA is promoting interoperability, aligned reporting standards, and data integration to ensure regional consistency and comprehensive monitoring. The platform will also include a carbon engine that links energy access data with carbon markets. This will automate the generation of carbon credits from verified electrification outcomes, helping ASCENT countries—especially those without existing carbon programs—access climate finance through faster, lower-cost, high-integrity carbon credit generation.

The ASCENT Program helps expand electricity access across 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, so a strong regional system to measure and track progress is essential. Each country monitors its own progress, and the data is collected through a central digital MRV platform managed by COMESA.

For countries using different tracking tools, COMESA is working to make them interoperable by using different systems, tools, or technologies that can work together smoothly and share information easily, with common reporting standards and data integration to ensure consistency across the region.

The platform will also include a carbon engine that connects energy access data with carbon markets. A carbon engine is an advanced software backend used within climate accounting platforms which acts as the core calculation infrastructure that ingests immense amounts of data from Enterprise Resource Planning – ERP systems, utility smart meters, and supply chains.

A carbon Engine processes raw data using complex emissions factors to automatically compute a company’s Scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions. It serves as the primary system of record needed to produce verified dMRV (digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification) logs for regulatory reporting and carbon credit generation.

This feature will automatically generate carbon credits from verified electrification results, helping ASCENT countries especially those without carbon programs, gain access to climate finance more easily and at lower cost, while maintaining high integrity. ASCENT’s climate finance page.

Technical Assistance and Capacity Building: COMESA provides extensive support to help ASCENT countries identify, pilot, and adopt relevant tools. For countries with existing digital tools, opportunities for technical and organizational enhancements, which comply with national laws and regulations, can be explored. Where gaps exist, COMESA can guide and support the adoption of necessary tools. Specifically, COMESA plans to fund the setup of relevant tools.

COMESA’s Advocacy and Knowledge Sharing: COMESA drives digitalization through knowledge exchange and advocacy, leveraging its convening power to raise awareness amongst ACENT countries about existing digital solutions and the process for their adoption. In collaboration with the World Bank, COMESA has for example organized webinars on digital best practices and carbon finance, appointed focal points in each country for digitalization and climate finance, and supported their participation in a major climate finance conference, where delegates were able to meet providers of digital solutions. (click here to learn more about the tools presented at the 2024 Innovate for Climate Conference).

How to Request Support

Countries can request digitalization support through COMESA (ascentproject@comesa.int). Support may include diagnostics, tool deployment, capacity building, system integration, and access to regional frameworks.

All ASCENT countries—whether currently participating or planning future engagement—are eligible to request digitalization support.

For more information, download the following resources:

Recordings

Conferences and Events

ASCENT Week 2024 – Leveraging Digital Technologies for ASCENT
ASCENT Week 2024 – Deep Dive – Digital Monitoring Reporting and Verification (dMRV)
ASCENT Carbon Day 2024 – ASCENT digital MRV: Enhancing Efficiency and Integrity of Energy Access Programs and Carbon Finance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zaI8r4KN6g – from16’16 to 1h29’03
ASCENT Carbon Day 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcQENYth-1E (from 4h29’56” to 5h13’20)

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