The project is working to enhance outer island development by achieving renewable energy and energy efficiency targets for Kiribati. Efforts to date have lacked links to enhancing economic development and livelihoods, and scale to meet targets. While widely distributed to households, small solar photovoltaic lighting systems provide only limited energy access. Affordable parts for repairs are not available. Larger systems such as solar photovoltaic mini-grids have addressed institutional needs mainly boarding schools but lack financial and technical sustainability. 

The project adopts a multi-pronged approach to address the challenges to renewable energy and enegy efficiency dissemination in the outer islands and to link such dissemination to addressing the broader challenge of outer island economic development. It addresses capacity gaps through training and outreach, facilitate adoption and enforcement of needed policies, promote the financing of outer island renewable energy and energy efficiency, address cost and technical challenges, and brings these together through demonstrations. It puts greater emphasis on the productive use of renewable energy and energy efficiency and expands emphasis of outer island energy development from institutional systems alone to include community systems that can support revenue generating activity, particularly related to coconuts, fish, and agricultural produce.