Sarah Bieber
Director, Climate Strategy, Acumen
2022 C3E International Award Winner
Sarah Bieber is the Director of Climate Strategy for Acumen, a global impact investor building markets to solve poverty. She leads strategy development for Acumen’s work at the intersection of climate and poverty.
Previously, Bieber served as Acumen’s Director of Energy Partnerships, bringing together donors, corporations, and other public- and private-sector stakeholders to invest in companies bringing clean energy access to the more than 685 million people without electricity globally. She has also managed Acumen’s Pioneer Energy Investment Initiative PLUS (PEII+), a $25 million program investing in sustainable-energy-powered appliances that help increase incomes and enhance climate resilience for livelihoods. She also co-led development of Acumen’s Hardest to Reach Initiative, which uses innovative financial structures to extend clean energy access into hard-to-reach markets, especially those in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
As a leading voice in the off-grid energy sector, Bieber represented Acumen on the Board of Directors of the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA) from 2019 to 2025. Recently, she helped convene an unprecedented coalition of 17 global partners to launch a $90+ million COVID Energy Access Relief Fund, which is providing essential financial support to companies serving more than 20 million people in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Before joining Acumen in 2018, Bieber led the Scaling Off-Grid Energy Grand Challenge at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Power Africa (2016–2018) and spent seven years as a foreign service officer for USAID in Bangkok and Washington, DC.
Bieber holds a Master of International Affairs in Energy and Environment from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, as well as bachelor’s degrees in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology from Tulane University.
+ Learn More About Sarah Bieber's Clean Energy Journey (Published October 2022)
More than 730 million people across the globe are still living without access to electricity, the vast majority in sub-Saharan Africa. Sarah Bieber has followed a unique path to help address this problem. In college, she studied ecology and evolutionary biology and became fascinated with how species adapted to their changing environments. As she learned about climate change, the ultimate challenge facing the human species, she realized she had found a lifelong career.
Since 2001, Sarah has worked in clean energy and climate policy. During a volunteer stint in East Africa, living in a rural community without running water or electricity, she couldn’t shake the injustice of a rapidly globalizing world where hundreds of millions of people were being left behind without access to modern conveniences. Creating a reliable, sustainable power grid is expensive and often beyond the reach of governments in developing countries. And yet, over the past decade, costs have dropped significantly for solar technology and battery storage, increasing the viability for expanding energy services.
Through her work at USAID and Acumen, Sarah focused on ending energy poverty by investing in innovative clean energy technologies and business models that catered to the specific needs of low-income communities. When the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to shutter the doors of many of the enterprises serving last mile customers, Sarah jumped into action. She convened investors and donors worldwide to raise a $90 million Energy Access Relief Fund. She is now working to extend the reach of off-grid energy solutions to the hardest-to-reach populations in Africa.