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Daystar Power
©Daystar Power
This partnership is part of the 2X Challenge, which is an initiative to promote quality employment and better access to leadership opportunities for women in developing countries.

Given its strong female leadership, Daystar Power already classifies as a gender investment. Women are well represented in its senior management and board positions. Notably, the CEO for the company’s Ghana operations is a woman. With its investors, Daystar Power has committed to increasing its women hires, targeting a 40% share of women in its workforce by 2024. Daystar Power will build on its traineeship program launched in early 2020 in Nigeria to improve female students’ access to engineer positions within the company.

"We will focus on hiring women and training them in technical and engineering roles. Our goal is to get more women into West Africa’s renewables sector", says Jasper Graf von Hardenberg, CEO and Co-Founder, Daystar Power. "We believe that diversity will bring us the competitive advantage we need when expanding from our key markets Nigeria and Ghana into Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Togo."

“Through the 2XChallenge and their own ambitious gender-smart investing objectives, DFIs such as Proparco have fuelled a strong movement dedicated to increasing the private sector’s contribution to women empowerment. Daystar Power’s commitment is a great step forward, which we hope will inspire many other ambitious businesses acknowledging the central role women are playing in sustainable development,” said Natou Bamba-Colon, head of Development Effectiveness, Proparco.

"IFU is committed to tackling challenges related to inclusion and diversity and signed up to the global 2X challenge in 2019, which Daystar Power is now also doing. We are proud that Daystar Power has already made great progress in this area, especially in a sector that is not traditionally well represented by women and look forward to supporting them on this journey," says Thomas Hougaard, Vice President, Sub-Saharan Africa, IFU. 

Proparco and IFU have made investment decisions of nearly 25 million USD. Both investors are committed to supporting gender equality in their investments, as a driver for commercial performance but particularly to promote women’s economic empowerment. The two are also members of the 2X Challenge that aims to advance opportunities for women through enterprise support, leadership and career progression, quality employment, and products/services that enhance women’s economic participation.