Rain Sensors (IFC-601838)

Regions
  • World
Geographic location where the impacts of the investment may be experienced.
Financial Institutions
  • International Finance Corporation (IFC)
International, regional and national development finance institutions. Many of these banks have a public interest mission, such as poverty reduction.
Project Status
Active
Stage of the project cycle. Stages vary by development bank and can include: pending, approval, implementation, and closed or completed.
Bank Risk Rating
U
Environmental and social categorization assessed by the development bank as a measure of the planned project’s environmental and social impacts. A higher risk rating may require more due diligence to limit or avoid harm to people and the environment. For example, "A" or "B" are risk categories where "A" represents the highest amount of risk. Results will include projects that specifically recorded a rating, all other projects are marked ‘U’ for "Undisclosed."
Voting Date
May 21, 2017
Date when project documentation and funding is reviewed by the Board for consideration and approval. Some development banks will state a "board date" or "decision date." When funding approval is obtained, the legal documents are accepted and signed, the implementation phase begins.
Borrower
*Borrower information not provided at the time of disclosure*
A public entity (government or state-owned) provided with funds or financial support to manage and/or implement a project.
Sectors
  • Technical Cooperation
The service or industry focus of the investment. A project can have several sectors.
Investment Type(s)
Advisory Services
The categories of the bank investment: loan, grant, guarantee, technical assistance, advisory services, equity and fund.
Project Cost (USD)
$ 0.13 million
Value listed on project documents at time of disclosure. If necessary, this amount is converted to USD ($) on the date of disclosure. Please review updated project documents for more information.
Primary Source

Original disclosure @ IFC website

Updated in EWS Feb 27, 2019

Disclosed by Bank Feb 13, 2019

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Project Description
If provided by the financial institution, the Early Warning System Team writes a short summary describing the purported development objective of the project and project components. Review the complete project documentation for a detailed description.

The objective of this proposed Research & Development (R&D) is to test and ultimately implement a practical & cost effective way to integrate rain-sensors, to measure rainfall/precipitation, currently available in the market to the roof-top solar energy panel systems that are being rolled out in many countries and regions globally including the Lighting Africa project (LA project).

With this enhanced rainfall data, we can address one of the prevailing challenges identified by the financial and insurance market in fostering and enhancing the development of sustainable parametric (weather index) insurance products through the provision of this required data.

The proposed R&D would benefit from the established infrastructure of the LA project by enhancing this systems monitoring capability with sensors to monitor and capture rainfall data (in addition to the radiation and temperature data already being collected on a real time basis).

To achieve this objective the project structured into 2 phases:

Phase 1: Technical development of Monitoring devices connected to the solar panels
Traditional rain gauges are expensive and due to their design not fraud free. It is therefore interesting to develop a simple rain monitoring system that is less fraud prone and can be incorporated into PV modules.

To develop the rainfall sensor system on PV modules, the project (R&D) will test the different available sensors and install them on a test PV panel, and compared with measurements achieved using a standard rain-gauge. This will enable the project to correlate the new measurement system with standard systems in order to assess the quality of data that can be obtained.

Phase 2: Business model and Data dissemination

  1. larger pilot test roll out in multiple locations & countries;
  2. developing a business plan for commercialization of Rain Sensors to be installed with PV Panels;
  3. formalizing a partnership with the LA project and its suppliers (of PV Solar Panels) for installation of Rain Sensors;
  4. finalizing the data collection and data sharing protocols in consultation with the LA Project, which is currently collecting data on temperature and radiation from sensors installed on the PV Solar panels;
  5. Develop a portal dedicated for weather (rainfall and temperature) data sharing.
Investment Description
Here you can find a list of individual development financial institutions that finance the project.

Contact Information
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*Contact information not provided at the time of disclosure*

ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISM OF IFC

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How it works

How it works