We will provide funding to install solar cold rooms, irrigation pumps, and grain mills to reduce losses and improve farm productivity.
The World Bank has approved a new $50 million loan to support solar-powered agricultural expansion projects in Nigeria and five other African countries. The aim is to increase farm productivity, reduce post-harvest losses and expand access to clean energy.
The initiative, unveiled through a program update involving the World Bank and its development partners including the Rockefeller Foundation, will support the deployment of solar-powered agricultural machinery across Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The funding will be used to deploy solar-powered cold rooms, refrigerators, water pumps, and rice mills to help farmers overcome persistent challenges related to insufficient storage, unreliable power, and limited access to modern processing tools, Bloomberg reported.
Agriculture employs more than a third of Nigeria’s workforce, but inefficiencies across the value chain continue to erode farmers’ incomes and threaten food security. Experts say the expansion of solar power-based solutions has the potential to significantly strengthen Nigeria’s agricultural system, especially by mitigating post-harvest losses caused by inadequate storage and power shortages.
Implementation of this project will be led by Clasp, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization focused on improving energy efficiency and expanding access to clean energy technologies in emerging markets.
The program is funded through the Productive Use Finance Facility (PUFF), an initiative under Mission 300, a flagship initiative jointly supported by the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB). Mission 300 aims to mobilize tens of billions of dollars to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030.
Development partners have indicated that this effort could be further scaled up as implementation progresses at the national level. The Rockefeller Foundation has already committed $12 million to the program, but has signaled it is willing to commit additional funds.
“The ability to scale up is always there,” Rockefeller Foundation Chairman Rajiv Shah said on January 15 during a visit to a solar-powered refrigeration facility operated by SocoFresh in Nairobi.
Shah noted that the foundation supports early-stage innovations that governments and multilateral institutions can later scale up, adding that more resources will be made available country by country.
“We are funding innovations, new projects, new ideas that governments, the World Bank and others can scale up,” he said during another visit to a farm that uses solar-powered cold rooms for export-oriented produce.
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the global epicenter of energy poverty, with more than 80 percent of the world’s population without access to electricity. An estimated 600 million people in the region remain without reliable electricity, limiting the productivity of farmers and small businesses.
PUFF is designed to address this challenge by providing grants, subsidies, and technical assistance to solar equipment suppliers and distributors to serve rural and off-grid communities that are often excluded from traditional financing.
From 2022 to 2024, the facility completed a two-year pilot phase, supporting 24 companies from six participating countries. With the pilot completed, the program is now moving into full-scale deployment with the support of new World Bank funding and philanthropy funding.
