Gracia Munganga

Gracia Munganga is a trained chemical engineer with a Master’s from the University of Cape Town (UCT)`and has over a decade of experience across green economy policy and advisory, waste economy, energy access and renewables (mainly solar PV and waste-to-energy) on the continent, having worked for GreenCape, Anaergia Africa, the Climate Innovation Centre South Africa (CIC-SA) and the Carbon Trust Africa. Today, Gracia heads SustainSolar -part of the SustainGroup – a leading system integrator of high quality, turnkey containerised solar and battery storage systems (BESS). SustainSolar offers an innovative range of products consisting of modular, plug-and-play solutions suitable for various applications such as off-grid power supply, mini-grids for rural electrification, hybrid diesel fuel saver systems for commercial solutions and rapid deployment mobile systems. Besides running SustainSolar operations, the company is also developing a first-of-its-kind construction finance model targeted at results-based financing (RBF) mini-grid developers expected to launch in Q4 of 2023. To date, SustainSolar has installed 30+ systems across nine countries with leading developers (DRC on Idjwi Island, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, South Africa, Benin, Madagascar, Sudan and South Sudan). Some of her career highlights include amongst others, developing the waste economy sector desk through growing the membership base and publishing the annual waste economy market intelligence at GreenCape, leading the delivery of mini-grid market intelligence reports for the African Development Bank at the Carbon Trust Africa for Sierra Leone, Angola, Tchad and Ethiopia while working on the UK Aid-funded Transforming Energy Access (TEA). Under TEA, she led the design and implementation of institutional and technical capacity-building initiatives to increase participation of African-led organisations (such as AMDA, Club-ER and AFUR) in the delivery of energy access programmes on the continent.