The World Bank has approved $50 million for a solar agricultural expansion project in Nigeria and five other African countries.

Agriculture employs more than a third of Nigeria’s workforce, yet inefficiencies continue to erode farmers’ incomes and food supply.

The expansion of PUFF-backed solutions is expected to have significant implications for Nigeria’s agricultural value chain, particularly in tackling post-harvest losses driven by inadequate storage, unreliable electricity, and limited access to modern processing tools.

A Bloomberg report said the project, disclosed through programme updates involving the World Bank and its partners, including the Rockefeller Foundation, will boost productivity, cut post-harvest losses, and expand clean energy access.

The funding will support the deployment of solar-powered cold rooms, refrigerators, water pumps, and grain mills across Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with implementation led by Clasp, a Washington DC-based non-profit organisation focused on energy efficiency and clean energy access.

The World Bank-backed initiative has attracted strong backing from development partners, with officials indicating that the programme could expand further as country-level implementation gathers pace.

The Rockefeller Foundation, which has already committed $12 million to the scheme, has signalled that additional resources may be deployed over time.

“There is always the ability to scale that up,” the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, 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,” Shah added.

“We finance the innovations, the new projects and the new ideas that governments, the World Bank and others can then take to scale,” he said during a separate visit to a farm facility using solar-powered cold rooms for export-bound produce.

The financing is being channelled through the Productive Use Financing Facility (PUFF), an initiative operating 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 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, a gap that continues to constrain economic growth and limit productivity for farmers and small businesses.

PUFF is designed to bridge the affordability gap by providing grants, subsidies, and technical assistance to suppliers and distributors of solar-powered equipment.

The programme focuses on enabling these suppliers to reach rural and off-grid communities that are typically excluded from conventional financing.

Between 2022 and 2024, PUFF completed a two-year pilot phase, supporting 24 businesses across the six participating countries.

With the pilot phase completed, the programme is now transitioning into full-scale deployment, backed by fresh World Bank financing and philanthropic capital. (Channels TV)

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