Request for proposals for Finance Expert: Financial Structuring for Institutional Clean Cooking and Sustainable School Meals in Kenya The Government of Kenya, through the Office of the Special Envoy on Climate Change (OSECC) and NACONEK, is supporting the transition of schools from biomass-based cooking to cleaner, more efficient and sustainable systems, in service of the countrys expanding school feeding programme and its wider climate and clean energy commitments. WRI, with CIFF, and the Government of Kenya and other partners, is developing the national investment case, technology assessment and financing architecture needed to take institutional clean cooking to scale. A national assessment is underway to generate the primary evidence base on school cooking systems, energy demand, food systems and institutional readiness across all 47 counties. This Terms of Reference covers a distinct but closely linked component of that work relating financial structuring and investment design that will determine how the transition can be financed and sustained. The aim of this assignment is to determine how schools, government and the financial sector can together fund the shift at scale, and on terms that schools can afford. The immediate focus is a 1,000-school Phase 1 pipeline, designed to be both deliverable in the near term and a proof of concept for a broader blended finance facility capable of transitioning the wider school system, including boarding, faith-based and private schools with differing financing needs and capacities. The financing model is intended to align with an emerging public and philanthropic architecture, with concessional and first-loss capital used to bridge the gap between what schools can afford and what the market currently offers. The defining feature of this assignment is that the financing model must be built from primary evidence on both sides of the transaction. On the demand side, this means engaging directly with schools including school heads, bursars and education authorities to understand real financing needs, capitation models and flows, affordability and the institutional barriers to adoption. On the supply side, it means engaging financiers to establish genuine appetite, pricing and conditionality. The Finance Expert is responsible for generating this evidence and translating it into an investable model. 2. OBJECTIVE OF THE ASSIGNMENT The overall objective is to design the financial structuring and investment architecture for institutional clean cooking in Kenyan schools, grounded in primary demand-side and supply-side evidence, and to produce an investor-ready prototype model for the 1,000-school Phase 1 pipeline that can be scaled to the wider school system. SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES The Finance Expert shall: 1. Characterize the financial sector and policy landscape relevant to institutional cooking finance, including lending terms, capital flows, risk perceptions and cross-sectoral policy coherence. 2. Establish, through primary engagement with schools and bursars, the demand-side picture of financing flows, capitation reliability, debt exposure, affordability and the institutional decision and procurement chain. 3. Establish, through primary engagement with financiers, the supply-side picture of appetite, pricing, tenor and conditionality for lending to schools. 4. Define the concessionality gap between school-level affordability and market rates, as the foundation for the blended finance design. 5. Design and test blended finance instrument options and a prototype investment model for the Phase 1 pipeline, with a clear pathway to scale. 6. Assess procurement models and carbon finance revenue potential as inputs to the financing structure. 3. SCOPE OF WORK The assignment combines desk research, targeted primary engagement, and quantitative modelling. The Finance Expert will coordinate closely with the national assessment team to draw on its bursar interviews and financial institution engagements, while conducting the additional, finance-specific interviews required to build the model. The work is organized around the following tasks. Task 1: Inception and analytical framework Review project documents and the national assessment instruments and develop a detailed methodology and analytical framework for the financial structuring work. This includes the design of the demand-side and supply-side interview protocols, the approach to selecting schools and financial institutions for engagement, and a workplan setting out how the financial analysis will integrate with the wider assessment. Task 2: Financial sector and policy landscape Conduct desk research to characterize the financial sector landscape, covering lending terms, capital flows and risk perceptions relevant to school and clean energy finance. Review the policy and regulatory frameworks across the relevant sectors, including energy, education and the capitation grant framework, climate, water and WASH, and food and nutrition, identifying coherence, gaps and conflicts that bear on the financing of institutional cooking. Analyze institutional budget and capitation funding data as the starting point for the affordability work. Task 3: Demand-side primary engagement (schools) Engage directly with a purposive sample of schools across the relevant typologies, including boarding and day, public and private, and across ecological and socio-economic contexts. Through structured interviews with head teachers, bursars and boards, establish the real financing position of schools: the timing and reliability of capitation grants, other income sources, existing debt exposure, and the practical limits of what schools can afford to repay. Map the decision and procurement chain that a school must navigate to approve and complete a cooking system installation, including budget head restrictions on capitation use, procurement thresholds, and the absence of technical specifications or approved supplier lists. The purpose is to establish, from evidence rather than assumption, both the affordability ceiling and the institutional barriers that any financing model must accommodate. Task 4: Supply-side primary engagement (financiers) Engage directly with the range of potential financing actors, including commercial banks with education or clean energy exposure, SACCOs with school membership, development finance institutions, impact investors active in Kenya, and philanthropic foundations with relevant mandates. Through key informant interviews, establish each actors current portfolio, risk appetite, ticket size, pricing and conditionality for lending to schools, and their view of what would be required to participate in a blended structure. The purpose is to establish genuine market appetite and pricing, rather than indicative assumptions, so that the financing model reflects what financiers will fund. Task 5: Credit readiness and the concessionality gap Bringing together the demand-side and supply-side evidence, assess institutional credit readiness across the sampled school population and define the concessionality gap, the difference between what schools can afford to repay and what market rates require. This gap defines the scale of first-loss and concessional capital that GCF or philanthropic resources must provide and is the primary data foundation for the financing model. Assess clean fuel and equipment supply chain readiness in parallel, mapping distributors, geographic reach and institutional procurement capacity, and testing whether aggregated procurement could reduce unit costs meaningfully for a 1,000-school pipeline. Task 6: Blended finance instrument design and modelling Design two to three blended finance instrument options for the Phase 1 pipeline, spanning a guarantee-only structure, a concessional credit line through a DFI, and a full blended facility with philanthropic first-loss. For each, specify the capital stack, effective end-borrower rate in Kenyan shillings, tenor, repayment mechanism, required first-loss coverage, leverage ratio and minimum viable facility size. Simulate repayment flows over a ten-year horizon at school and portfolio level, testing affordability under current tariff, social tariff and tariff escalation scenarios. Task 7: Procurement models Design and assess procurement model options for deploying cooking systems across 1,000 schools, including school-by-school procurement, county-level aggregation, a national framework contract with approved suppliers, and an ESCO model in which a service company installs and maintains the system and the school pays per meal or per unit of energy. Assess each against government procurement rules and recommend a preferred pathway. Task 8: Carbon finance revenue potential Assess the potential for verified carbon credit generation from the cooking transition, reviewing applicable methodologies and Kenyas emerging voluntary carbon market framework. Estimate eligible tCO2e per school per year under the transition scenarios, and model revenue at current and projected prices. Critically, assess whether carbon revenue is material enough to subsidize borrowing costs within the blended structure or to fund results-based payments to schools as a demand-side incentive. Carbon is to be treated as upside, not as a dependency in the core model. Task 9: Prototype investment model and reporting Integrate the primary and desk inputs into a single prototype investment model for the 1,000-school Phase 1 pipeline, specifying total capital requirement, capital stack by actor, blended interest rate, government fiscal contribution, the role of Kenya Power, carbon revenue potential and a deployment schedule. This model, with an accompanying investor-ready summary, is the primary output of the assignment and will be used for investor engagement. All findings are to be validated with Tender Link : https://www.wri.org/about/procurement-opportunities
