The World Bank has approved $50 million to expand solar-powered agricultural infrastructure in Nigeria and five other African countries, in a bid to boost farm productivity, reduce post-harvest losses and deepen access to clean energy.
The funding, disclosed through programme updates involving the World Bank and its partners, including the Rockefeller Foundation, will support the deployment of solar-powered cold rooms, refrigerators, irrigation pumps and grain mills across Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Implementation will be led by Clasp, a Washington DC-based non-profit organisation focused on energy efficiency and clean energy access, according to a Bloomberg report.
Development partners say the initiative could expand further as country-level rollouts gather momentum. The Rockefeller Foundation, which has already committed $12 million to the scheme, signalled that additional resources may be mobilised over time.
“There is always the ability to scale that up,” Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah said on January 15 during a visit to a solar-powered cold storage facility operated by SokoFresh in Nairobi.
“There’ll be more resources country by country as well,” he added.
The financing is being channelled through the Productive Use Financing Facility (PUFF), an initiative under Mission 300, a flagship programme backed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB). Mission 300 aims to mobilise tens of billions of dollars to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030.
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the global epicentre of energy poverty, accounting for more than 80 per cent of the world’s population without access to electricity. An estimated 600 million people in the region still live without reliable power, a constraint that continues to undermine economic growth and agricultural productivity.
PUFF is designed to bridge the affordability gap by providing grants, subsidies and technical assistance to suppliers and distributors of solar-powered equipment, enabling them to reach rural and off-grid communities that are typically excluded from conventional financing.
Between 2022 and 2024, the facility completed a two-year pilot phase, supporting 24 businesses across the six participating countries. With the pilot concluded, the programme is now transitioning into full-scale deployment, backed by fresh World Bank financing and philanthropic capital.
The expansion is expected to have significant implications for Nigeria’s agricultural value chain, particularly in addressing post-harvest losses caused by poor storage, unreliable electricity and limited access to modern processing tools.
Agriculture employs more than a third of Nigeria’s workforce, yet inefficiencies continue to erode farmers’ incomes and weaken food supply chains.
One pilot beneficiary, SokoFresh, currently serves about 19,000 farmers across East Africa through solar-powered cold storage facilities. The technology allows farmers to store produce longer, access higher-value markets and reduce waste.
By scaling access to solar-powered agricultural technologies, the World Bank and its partners aim to strengthen food security, raise rural incomes and accelerate Africa’s transition to clean energy.
