Sustainability assessment: Mozambique

Ensuring long-term success through using effective sustainability assessment: Mozambique

GEXSI Capital Partners focuses on developing low-impact, innovative business models that possess a concrete commercial focus and also include positive outcomes for both people and the region in which the businesses are based.

A key element of this is in undertaking an extensive sustainability assessment.  The aim of the sustainability assessment is to ensure that prospective social business ventures do not damage the environment; that they yield positive social and environmental impacts for the target groups; and, that they are commercially sound, and could experience a steady revenues over the long-term.

GEXSI Capital Partners has been working closely with the Jatropha Alliance to undertake an extensive sustainability assessment in Mozambique.  Here, the aim of the assessment is to support the certification of Jatropha as a recognised biofuel produced to a recognised standard.

The Jatropha industry is still in a very early stage of development: very few projects are more than two years old and hardly any project can demonstrate significant production of Jatropha oil yet. Indeed, sustainability monitoring is non-existent thus far due to the sector’s infancy.

The current project GEXSI Capital Partners is coordinating is to help the Jatropha industry to set a logical next step on the road to sustainable and certified Jatropha biomass chains, with the overall aim to build up knowledge for future certification of Jatropha biofuels through a benchmark sustainability assessment using existing sustainability criteria frameworks.

Staff from GEXSI Capital Partners have been involved in stages of the sustainability assessments development and implementation, and with the final report soon to be published, have been instrumental in analysing and interpreting the results, and providing key recommendations to advance this fundamental component of formalising the Jatropha industry.