The World Bank has approved 50 million dollars in funding for a solar-powered agricultural expansion project that will be implemented in Nigeria and five other African countries, according to programme updates involving its development partners.
The project targets long-standing energy and storage gaps that affect agriculture across the region. In Nigeria, agriculture employs more than a third of the workforce, yet inefficiencies linked to poor electricity access, weak storage systems, and limited processing tools continue to reduce farmers’ incomes and disrupt food supply.
A Bloomberg report said the programme will boost productivity, reduce post-harvest losses, and expand access to clean energy solutions for farmers and small agribusinesses. The funding will be used to deploy solar-powered cold rooms, refrigerators, water pumps, and grain mills across Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Implementation of the project will be led by Clasp, a Washington DC-based non-profit organisation that focuses on energy efficiency and clean energy access in emerging markets. The expansion of PUFF-backed solutions is expected to strengthen Nigeria’s agricultural value chain by addressing losses caused by inadequate storage, unreliable power supply, and limited access to modern equipment.
The initiative has received strong backing from development partners, with officials indicating that the programme could grow further as implementation advances at the country level. The Rockefeller Foundation has already committed 12 million dollars to the scheme and has signalled that additional resources may be deployed over time.
“There is always the ability to scale that up,” said Rajiv Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, 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,” Shah added.
Speaking during a separate visit to a farm facility using solar-powered cold rooms for export-bound produce, Shah said, “We finance the innovations, the new projects and the new ideas that governments, the World Bank and others can then take to scale.”
The financing is being channelled through the Productive Use Financing Facility, PUFF, which operates under Mission 300, a flagship programme backed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank. 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 epicentre of global 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, limiting economic growth and productivity.
PUFF is designed to close the affordability gap by providing grants, subsidies, and technical assistance to suppliers and distributors of solar-powered equipment. Between 2022 and 2024, PUFF completed a two-year pilot phase, supporting 24 businesses across the six participating countries. The programme is now transitioning into full-scale deployment with new World Bank financing. Officials said rollout timelines will vary based on readiness levels.
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