Sarah Bieber

Head of Energy Partnerships, Acumen

2022 C3E International Award Winner

Sarah Bieber is the Head of Energy Partnerships for Acumen, a nonprofit investment fund that supports businesses whose products and services are enabling the poor to transform their lives. She leads a global team working to provide clean energy access to the more than 730 million people who live without it. She brings together donors, corporations, and other public- and private-sector stakeholders to devise strategies and create coalitions that invest in clean energy companies serving low-income communities. From 2018 to 2021, Bieber managed Acumen’s Pioneer Energy Investment Initiative (PEII), a $22 million program that de-risks energy enterprises with a commitment to serving the poor, and co-led development of an initiative to use 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 also represents Acumen on the Board of Directors of the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA). Most 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 & Environment from Columbia University School of International & 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

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.