The World Bank’s ASCENT program aims to accelerate sustainable and clean energy access to 100 million people and access to clean cooking to 20 million people across 20+ AFE countries through the adoption of off-grid solar, mini-grids, grid extensions, and clean cooking technologies. Central to this initiative and as part of the Energy Access Standard, GCC will implement and operate the ASCENT Energy Access Standard Portal, designed to facilitate the finance flows from carbon markets for critical clean energy transformation in the ASCENT countries.

To enhance the robustness of energy access methodologies, GCC has updated the baseline and monitoring methodologies to integrate digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (DMRV) technologies, ensuring compliance with the Paris Agreement and improving transparency, and enabling going to scale. Data from the program’s deployment of energy access technologies, after establishing necessary checks and balances, would be automatically collated to the GCC database, and Periodic Monitoring reports (PMR) would be generated automatically.  This is expected to enable the requesting of credit issuance on a near real-time basis.