Africa’s Green Tech Moment: How Solar, EVs, and Mini-Grids Are Rewriting the Energy Story

By BETAR Newsletter Desk | The Long Read, Issue 1 | March 2026

The numbers should shock you. More than 590 million people across sub-Saharan Africa — roughly twice the population of the United States — go to bed without reliable electricity. In 2010, that figure was 581 million. Fifteen years and hundreds of billions of dollars in development finance later, population growth is still outpacing the cables and pylons of traditional grid expansion.

But a different story is being written in parallel. It is told in the language of pay-as-you-go mobile payments, battery swap stations on Nairobi streets, and a factory in coastal Kenya assembling electric buses for the region’s matatu routes. It is told in venture capital term sheets and African Development Bank disbursements, in modest solar-powered homes in rural Uganda and in Morocco’s vast green hydrogen ambitions. Africa’s green tech moment is not coming. It is already underway — and the pace is accelerating faster than almost anyone predicted.

Africa’s Off-Grid Solar Revolution

Off-grid solar is not a stopgap. It is, increasingly, the backbone of electricity access across the continent.

In 2025, East Africa alone sold 6.6 million off-grid solar kits — 71 percent of global demand, and 37 percent more than the year before. The region has emerged as the unambiguous centre of gravity for the global pay-as-you-go solar industry, a technology that marries affordable hardware with mobile-money payment plans to put solar panels and LED lights in households that may wait decades for a conventional grid connection.

The companies driving this are no longer scrappy startups hunting for their next seed round. d.light, one of the original architects of the pay-as-you-go model, secured USD 300 million in debt financing in 2025 — the largest disclosed startup transaction on the continent. The Nairobi-headquartered company has now unlocked USD 842 million in cumulative consumer financing since founding, reaching customers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and beyond. “Securitisation has been a crucial innovation — it has unlocked affordability and enabled us to reach more households, improve livelihoods, and contribute to a sustainable future,” said co-founder and CEO Nedjip Tozun, whom Time Magazine named one of its top 100 climate leaders in 2024.

M-KOPA, another East African stalwart, crossed seven million customers in 2025 and has unlocked USD 2 billion in credit since its founding — a staggering figure that reflects how embedded mobile-financed solar has become in the region’s household economy. The company received a USD 51 million loan from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation in May 2024, a sign that U.S. development capital is following the market’s logic.

The grid-scale picture is equally striking. Africa added approximately 4.5 gigawatts of new solar PV capacity in 2025 — a 54 percent increase from 2024 and the strongest single year of solar expansion the continent has ever recorded. At least eighteen countries installed more than 100 megawatts in 2025, up from just two the year before. The era of two-country solar dominance — South Africa and Egypt accounting for the vast majority of capacity — is ending. The market is diversifying.

Costs have moved in lockstep with deployment. The global average solar levelised cost of energy (LCOE) hit USD 0.043 per kilowatt-hour in 2024, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). In parts of Africa, single-axis tracker systems are approaching USD 37 per megawatt-hour. The IEA projects African solar LCOE could fall to USD 0.018 per kilowatt-hour by 2030 — making it not just competitive with fossil fuels, but definitively cheaper. The economic argument for building new coal or gas-fired capacity in Africa is collapsing. Solar, in many contexts, has already won.

Electric Motorcycles and EVs in Africa

If solar is reshaping where Africa gets its power, electric two-wheelers are reshaping how Africa moves — and in the process, potentially dismantling one of the continent’s most carbon-intensive industries.

There are an estimated 27 million motorcycle taxis, known variously as boda bodas, okadas, and motos, operating across sub-Saharan Africa. They run on petrol, they are expensive to fuel, and they fill cities from Kampala to Lagos with exhaust. They are also the economic lifeline of hundreds of thousands of low-income drivers. Converting this fleet to electric is one of the highest-impact climate opportunities on the planet — and entrepreneurs have noticed.

Ampersand, which operates a battery-swap network for electric motorcycles in Rwanda and Kenya, now serves 5,700 e-motorcycles and processes more than 20,000 battery swaps daily. The model is elegant: instead of long charging waits, drivers pull into a swap station, exchange a depleted battery for a fully charged one in under a minute, and continue earning. In September 2024, Ampersand piloted its first solar-powered swap station in Nairobi — a 37-kilowatt installation that demonstrates the logic of pairing clean generation with clean mobility. The company is now opening its swap network to third-party motorcycle manufacturers, purchasing BYD battery cells for 40,000 units expected by end of 2026, and targeting 600,000 e-motos by 2030.

Spiro has moved even faster. The company — which operates Africa’s largest battery-swapping network across six countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Benin, and Togo — closed the largest-ever investment in African two-wheel electric mobility in October 2025: USD 100 million, led by FEDA (the development impact arm of Afreximbank). That followed more than USD 180 million in prior rounds. In February 2026, Spiro added a further USD 50 million debt facility backed by Afreximbank, Nithio, and the Africa Go Green Fund, bringing total capitalisation to nearly USD 290 million. The ambition is to surpass 100,000 deployed vehicles.

Days later, Nairobi-based Zeno closed a USD 25 million Series A to scale its full-stack Emara e-motorcycle and battery-swap network across Kenya and Uganda, bringing total Q1 2026 e-mobility capital raises in East Africa to more than USD 75 million. Founded by a former Tesla supply-chain executive, Zeno manufactures the bike, owns the swap network, and handles rider financing — a fully integrated model with 25,000 riders and fleet operators already on its waitlist.

But electric mobility in Africa is not only about motorcycles. BasiGo raised USD 42 million total in 2024 — including a Series A led by Africa50 and debt from British International Investment and the U.S. DFC — to deploy 1,000 electric buses across East Africa. Roam Electric, also Kenyan-based, secured USD 24 million in a Series A in February 2024 and received a further USD 10 million in U.S. government debt to develop electric motorcycles and buses alongside charging infrastructure. The East African corridor has become, quietly but unmistakably, one of the world’s most dynamic electric mobility markets.

Africa’s EV market is projected to grow from USD 2.8 billion in 2023 to USD 7 billion by 2028 — a compound annual growth rate of 20.6 percent, outpacing most comparable emerging markets.

Mini-Grids and Energy Access in Africa

For communities beyond the reach of even the most aggressive utility extension, the answer is decentralised. Mini-grids — small solar or hybrid generation assets combined with local distribution — are providing reliable power in parts of the continent where central infrastructure may not arrive for decades.

Husk Power Systems is perhaps the most ambitious operator in this space. The company is targeting USD 400 million in debt and equity ahead of a planned IPO in 2027, with a stated goal of providing clean energy to 100 million people. In May 2025, it received a USD 5 million investment from the International Finance Corporation, backed by the Government of Canada, for expansion in Nigeria. It has separately received grants to enter the Democratic Republic of Congo — a country where fewer than 20 percent of the population has access to electricity, and where the opportunity for decentralised solutions is enormous.

Nuru, a DRC-focused mini-grid developer, is already operating in that market. The company closed more than USD 40 million in Series B equity in 2023 and secured an additional USD 28 million in project finance. “We are thrilled to partner with such a dynamic group of investors who are keen to drive our vision of expanding energy access and transforming 5 million lives in the DRC,” said CEO Jonathan Shaw at the close of that round. Nuru’s model — solar hybrid mini-grids serving dense urban and peri-urban populations in eastern DRC — represents a different archetype from the rural last-mile approach, and may prove more commercially sustainable at scale.

Between 2020 and 2022, more than half of new electricity connections in sub-Saharan Africa came from off-grid systems. The mini-grid industry’s cumulative impact between 2009 and 2019 reached 60 million people across Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, and beyond. These are not marginal contributions to the access challenge — they are, increasingly, the main event.

Africa Clean Energy Investment: Who’s Funding the Transition

Capital is following ambition. In 2024, total investment in Africa’s energy sector reached USD 110 billion — nearly double what it was in 2019. Clean energy accounted for close to USD 40 billion of that. In 2025, African startups had already raised USD 2.8 billion in cleantech financing by August alone, on pace to match the full-year 2024 startup financing figure.

In 2026, the momentum has continued. In February, Spiro closed a USD 50 million debt facility backed by Afreximbank, Nithio, and the Africa Go Green Fund, bringing total capitalisation to nearly USD 290 million. That same month, South African solar developer SolarAfrica raised USD 94 million from Rand Merchant Bank and Investec to build its 114 MW SunCentral 2 solar plant in the Northern Cape — the latest phase of a 3 GW pipeline designed to deliver grid-bypass solar to South African industrial customers. Both deals were debt-financed, reflecting the structural shift now visible across the asset class: African climatetech is no longer a venture bet. It is infrastructure.

The World Bank’s Mission 300 initiative — a commitment to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030 — has mobilised pledges of USD 90 billion. The African Development Bank’s Desert to Power initiative is channelling USD 10 billion into the Sahel and East Africa solar corridor. The EU has committed EUR 15.1 billion for African renewable energy. None of these programmes will fully deliver on their ambitions, but collectively they are reshaping the cost and availability of capital for African green tech.

Venture capital is arriving too. Novastar Ventures — the continent’s largest VC firm — launched a USD 200 million People and Planet Fund III in 2024, backed by the Green Climate Fund’s equity investment, with a focus on renewable energy, e-mobility, circular economy, and regenerative agriculture. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates’s climate-focused fund, has deployed more than USD 31 million in African startups.

The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa approved 14 renewable energy projects across Kenya, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Chad in 2024 alone — adding approximately 840 megawatts of generating capacity and 1.5 million new electricity connections.

On the horizon, green hydrogen is attracting sovereign-scale ambition. Morocco is advancing a USD 10.6 billion green hydrogen and ammonia project. Egypt has signed a Joint Development Agreement involving bp, Masdar, and local partners. By 2050, Africa could export 40 megatons of hydrogen annually — making the continent a potential supplier to decarbonising Europe, and generating the kind of foreign exchange receipts that could transform public finances.

The Limits of Africa’s Clean Energy Boom

For all the momentum, a sober paragraph is warranted. Some 590 million people still lack reliable electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Population growth is eroding headline progress: in 2024, 6.8 million new connections were added, but population growth consumed most of that gain, leaving the net number of unelectrified Africans nearly unchanged from 2010. At current trajectories, 645 million people will still lack electricity in 2030. The IEA projects that universal access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa would cost only USD 25 billion annually through 2030 — a fraction of what rich countries spend annually on fossil fuel subsidies — but the financing is not flowing at that rate.

Currency weakness is also a real constraint. West Africa saw off-grid solar kit sales fall 33 percent in 2024, dragged down by inflation and currency volatility. The economics of pay-as-you-go solar depend on stable mobile money purchasing power, and that assumption is under pressure in Nigeria, Ghana, and francophone West Africa in ways that East Africa’s relatively stronger currency environment has not yet experienced.

Africa’s Energy Transition: What Comes Next

Africa’s energy story used to be told as a story of deficits — power cuts, diesel generators, petrol jerry cans. It is increasingly told as a story of leapfrogging: households moving directly from candles to solar, transport fleets moving directly from petrol to electric, industry moving directly from grid dependence to distributed generation.

That transition is not complete. It may not be linear. It will certainly be uneven across the continent’s 54 countries, 1.4 billion people, and wildly varying governance and infrastructure landscapes. But the direction is now clear, and the economics are increasingly irreversible.

The solar LCOE is falling. The EV swap network is expanding. The mini-grid developer is eyeing a 2027 IPO. The continent that was supposed to wait for the world’s clean tech solutions is, in several crucial respects, already ahead of it — building models for distributed energy access that have no precedent anywhere else on earth.

Africa is not merely a beneficiary of the global energy transition. It is, in its own particular and urgent way, leading it.

Voices

“Securitisation has been a crucial innovation that has allowed us to scale our consumer financing offering, unlocking affordability and enabling us to reach more households, improve livelihoods, and contribute to a sustainable future.”

— Nedjip Tozun, Co-Founder & CEO, d.light (Time 100 Climate Leaders 2024)

“We are thrilled to partner with such a dynamic group of investors who are keen to drive our vision of expanding energy access and transforming 5 million lives in the DRC.”

— Jonathan Shaw, CEO, Nuru (on closing USD 40M+ Series B, 2023)

Clean Energy Data: Africa at a Glance

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