Very easy to invest in projects that do good in Africa and help the climate, within a tax-free IFISA. The platform makes keeping track of all one's investments very easy. Obviously with this type of i... See more
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I've used the platform for some years to put money to good use for renewable energy in Africa. Interest rates are good, but that reflects the increased risk of these projects, and I have lost signifi... See more
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Energise Africa have consistently performed well, having used them to invest since 2018. Their online platform, their management of these emerging market bonds, and their comms when things don't work... See more
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Energise Africa enables small or larger investors to invest money in African projects to provide solar energy to small villages and businesses. Most African villages have no energy sources. This is... See more
Company details
Written by the company
Put your money to work fighting climate change. Target up to 8% annual returns investing in companies that provide solar energy access to African families. Start with as little as £50. Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high - risk investment and you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong.
Join thousands of investors bringing light to sub-Saharan Africa!
Written by the company
- Energise Africa enables you to invest directly in de-risked projects that brigh clean energy access.
- Register an account with Energise Africa and you can join thousands of UK investors who are investing from as little as £50 to support pioneering businesses bringing clean, solar energy access to off-grid homes in sub-Saharan Africa, targeting returns of up to 8%. Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high - risk investment and you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong.
Contact info
The Old Music Hall, 106 - 108 Cowley Road,, OX4 1JE, Oxford, United Kingdom
- help@energiseafrica.com
- energiseafrica.com
4.7
Excellent
639 reviews
Asks customers to review
This company invites their customers to review, whether positive or negative
Replied to 100% of negative reviews
Typically replies within 1 week
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Easy to negotiate.
The website is clear and easy to negotiate.
Clear guidance is given about how to invest and the associated risks.
March 27, 2024
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 4-star review of Energise Africa on Trustpilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide! If you have any comments or suggestions to improve our service, please get in touch at help@energiseafrica.com
Yours
The Energise Africa Team
Once you get used to it
Once you get used to how to use the site, it is very easy to see what you are investing in and how they are performing.
March 27, 2024
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 4-star review of Energise Africa on Trustpilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide! If you have any comments or suggestions to improve our service, please get in touch at help@energiseafrica.com
Yours
The Energise Africa Team
Very bad investments. I’ve lost thousands
Basically throwing money away in my experience.
Anyone thinking of investing in these schemes would be well advised to take seriously the warning on their website
“ Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest” This turns out in many cases to be a good prediction of what will happen to your money.
I invested in a range of these nice sounding projects over several years.
Most of them have turned out to be extremely bad investments with pie in the sky business plans that crashed on contact with the real world.
In about half the projects they’ve been sold off for peanuts with nothing for the investor, or just gone out of business.
The reassurance offered by “due diligence” checks turned out to be a bit of a joke.
The whole thing is a nice idea but you would need to think of throwing money at these projects more like a charity donation and NOT a serious investment.
I have lost thousands already and the various promises of gradual payback usually get superseded by a later message saying to the effect of “sorry, I know the company said they would pay back tiny amounts over 4 years, but now they can’t even do that, so expect nothing.
Someone made a lot of money but not me!
Initially I had a nice warm feeling about helping all those nice people and the environment. Now I have a sickening dread every time I get an update email from Energise Africa. On each occasion it tells me I’ve lost another £1300, or £500 or whatever is left of my misguided altruistic investment.
They should just stop taking peoples money. Or just openly make it a charity donation.
Also, please note that Mr A Pinder gave a glowing review in 2021 saying how easy it is to buy and sell investments. Well, it’s quite easy to buy but you definitely can’t “easily sell” these fixed term instruments. You are in it for the duration of the bond, including the ones that fail to pay the due interest, or just collapse with total write-off. Believe me, if you could sell up I would have done that and saved myself thousands.
It’s disgraceful that Energise Africa took the time to thank Mr Pinder but did not correct this highly misleading statement.
That recommendation should be taken down.
Update
I note that you’ve added a correction to Mr Pinder’s misleading review. The bonds can’t be sold and the investors have to hold them for the duration.
Well done.
Thanks for your reply. Your explanations are all valid and true, but potential investors need more transparency about what has really happened in the cases of a lot of the funded projects. It all looks lovely and ethical but behind the gloss there is the reality of a string of failed projects and companies, with large losses for well meaning non-professional investors like me.
March 8, 2024
Unprompted review
Reply from Energise Africa
Thank you for your review – we value all feedback.
We are sorry to hear that your experience of investing through Energise Africa has not been positive and we can assure you that no one has profited at your expense.
As you point out, the warnings on our website and in our offer documents do highlight the risks of investing in early stage businesses in developing countries. In recent times, the pandemic, inflation and local currency weakness have made things more difficult for some of our bond issuers and the low income communities they serve. Meanwhile, equity investors have been less willing to sustain businesses through a tough period. That said, our issuers have repaid £25 million of capital, plus interest, to investors.
When companies have been unable to make scheduled payments, our team has made strenuous efforts to find solutions that, where possible, recoup some capital for bondholders. At the same time, Energise Africa is working hard so we can offer a wider range of opportunities across different industries and countries that will help investors diversify their portfolio.
Risk Information provided on our website and in offer documents makes it clear that investors should not expect to be able to sell their investment early and should expect to hold it to maturity. Thank you for highlighting the review from 2021. We should have picked up and corrected the contributor’s use of the word “sell” – we suspect this was referring to ease of receiving capital and interest payments into the investor’s wallet or bank account. Thank you for flagging this and we will update our reply to that review accordingly.
We have and shall maintain our focus on enabling investors to put their money to work in ways that achieve meaningfully positive environmental and social impact. This is about much more than giving people a nice warm feeling. It is hard to over-state the transformational effect of providing a household with electricity. Energise Africa investors have helped to transform the lives of over 850,000 people through access to clean energy, while avoiding 190,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
While this in no way diminishes the consequences of financial loss, it does offer an alternative perspective on what an investment has achieved.
Our team will be happy to discuss any aspect of your investment portfolio with you directly, please get in touch by email help@energiseafrica.com
Again, thank you for taking the time to review, we do appreciate your feedback.
Good company doing important stuff that…
Good company doing important stuff that I have invested in for several years.
February 2, 2024
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 4-star review of Energise Africa on Trustpilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide! If you have any comments or suggestions to improve our service, please get in touch at help@energiseafrica.com
Yours
The Energise Africa Team
Invest in environmental projects
Easy to invest in environmentally sustainable projects that make a difference to people's lives. Withdrawal of the capital repayment and interest is very easy - I have made several investments and each one has been paid back in full plus interest.
February 2, 2024
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on Trustpilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
Ordering is easy and the orders are…
Ordering is easy and the orders are quickly processed
January 26, 2024
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on Trustpilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
Useful site for investors
Useful site for investors, though can be a little difficult to navigate if you're a first-timer.
January 18, 2024
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 4-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY ON 17.5 % OVERDUE…
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY ON 17.5 % OVERDUE ACCOUNTS AND POOR COMMUNICATION
There are many warnings on the website about investment risk but the key statistic that 17.5% of loans are overdue and 1.6% written off is buried right at the bottom of the front page...you need to know where to look!
The significant overdue loans figure should be highlighted at the top of the home page but this of course conflicts with marketing new Investments...
A significant number of investors are likely to lose money on future loans of this type..an ethical company should treat potential Investors ethically by giving them easy to find material information!
When loans become overdue communication is pretty sporadic. There is often over a year between updates!
Both these issue were raised in a phone call with the CEO Lisa Ashford over a year ago and in my have not been adequately addressed !!
December 31, 2023
Unprompted review
Reply from Energise Africa
Thank you for your review; we appreciate all investor feedback.
We do our best to be as transparent as possible and provide our investors with regular updates on the repayment status of all projects. For projects where there are delays in repayments or defaults, we update investors as soon as we have information on the progress of these cases. Going forward, we now update at least quarterly, even if no new information is available.
As you have pointed out, we strive to make the risks associated with the investments we offer clear on the site and publish our investment track record on the Portfolio Overview page.
We have also published a Q&A for investors on risk and repayments, and you can access that here: https://www.energiseafrica.com/news/q-a-on-energise-africa-risk-and-returns
Energise Africa is raising debt for single organisations, through crowdfunding. Investors who invest in these bond instruments are investing in direct investments into single organisations and these are considered high risk investments by the UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Direct investments are also able to deliver high impact as investors can have a clear line of sight into the organisations and projects that are funded by the finance being raised through this specific offer.
Thank you again for sharing your feedback. If you have further comments or concerns, please email help@energiseafrica.com and we will be happy to respond directly to you.
direct investment to tackle climate change
energiseafrica offers a great opportunity to directly invest in businesses tackling climate change.
This review was written when I invested.
November 17, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
Great platform
Great platform, ethical investments with good financial returns. There is some risk involved, which you need to be aware of.
November 20, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
Excellent investment opportunity
I have had investments with Energise Africa for more than 10 years. All have them have been managed well and have performed as expected.
November 20, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
Very smooth transaction
November 17, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
A very constructive and easy way to…
A very constructive and easy way to invest in low carbon for Africa.
November 7, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
Great impact investments, but not enough projects to invest in!
Fantastic opportunities to invest with a reasonable return and provide impact at the same time.
BUT there are never enough investment opportunities so I have cash balance not being invested for long periods before the next project comes up.
Repayment schedules also mean that you have to regularly manage your portfolio and re-invest - which is difficult because often you can't!
October 27, 2023
Simple purchasing
The purchasing process couldn't be simpler, and works very smoothly and quickly.
September 28, 2023
Clear information and easy to invest…
Clear information and easy to invest with warnings of risks
September 12, 2023
5-year investor
i have invested with Energise Africa for over 5 years. The only issue i have had is that by the time notification of a new offer arrives by Email the offer is often closed or nearly so. That is very good news for crowd funding but a little annoying!
September 12, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 4-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide! If you have any comments or suggestions to improve our service, please get in touch at help@energiseafrica.com
Yours
The Energise Africa Team
A great way to invest ethically
Energise Africa is a great way to invest in projects that provide sustainable, green energy to people in developing countries. They are clear about the risks of such investments, as well as the benefits, and are diligent in their research to minimise these risks. My two previous investments have both done well, and I have just placed a third order. Highly recommended!
September 12, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
Straight forward process for sustainable investing.
Making the world a cleaner better place with sustainable investing in developing countries.
September 11, 2023
Reply from Energise Africa
Hello,
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for leaving a 5-star review of Energise Africa on TrustPilot. We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are delighted you are happy with the service we provide!
Yours,
The Energise Africa team
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