The International Finance Corporation (IFC), alongside the Canadian Government, has made a $5 million investment in Husk Nigeria to scale up the deployment of solar hybrid mini grids in underserved communities in Northern Nigeria.
The Investment was announced on Thursday in a statement issued in Lagos.
The financing is intended to expand access to affordable, reliable, and renewable electricity in off-grid areas, which still constitutes one of Nigeria’s greatest development hurdles due to energy poverty.
The facility will help build and run as many as 108 mini-grid sites by Husk, possibly connecting around 115,000 individuals and businesses with approximately 28,750 new electricity connections.
This is the first investment under the IFC Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES) Platform, a $200 million debt facility that was signed in November 2024.
The platform seeks to catalyze private-sector solutions for expanding electricity access throughout West and Central Africa.
The DARES Platform is a complementary adjunct to the World Bank-financed Nigeria DARES Project, which has an approved budget of $750 million and was launched in December 2023, with the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) as the implementing agency.
The two have thus been synchronized for targeted interventions to provide new or improved energy access through decentralized renewable energy (DRE) solutions to over 17.5 million Nigerians.
Project to cost $25 million – IFC
Husk’s project has an overall cost of around $25 million, according to the IFC. The financing package worth $5 million includes a senior loan of $2.5 million from IFC’s account and a concessional subordinated loan of $2.5 million from the Canada-IFC Renewable Energy Program for Africa.
It said that the facility is structured as a revolving loan, allowing Husk to repay and redraw funds multiple times during the project’s implementation.
What they are saying:
Regional Vice President for Africa at the IFC, Ethiopis Tafara, described the development as “an innovative approach to tackling one of Africa’s most pressing challenges—energy access.
Tafara noted further, “By partnering with Husk, a leading renewable energy developer globally, through the first project under the DARES Platform, we are not only addressing the immediate electricity needs of underserved communities in Nigeria but also laying the foundation for a scalable model that can be replicated across the continent.”
Co-founder and CEO of Husk, Manoj Sinha, said, “ This innovative debt facility is exactly what the minigrid industry needs to scale — blended, long-term and affordable capital.”
Country Director, Husk Nigeria, Olu Aruike, noted, “Adding 108 new communities to our minigrid portfolio with IFC support is an important step toward our goal of deploying at least 250MW of decentralised renewable energy projects in Nigeria.”
More insights
- DARES Platform is a part of the World Bank’s comprehensive, programmatic engagement in Nigeria’s power sector to help the FGN realize its Energy Transition Plan (ETP) vision.
- The project aims to increase access to electricity services for households and MSMEs with private sector-led distributed renewable energy generation.
- Data from REA website shows that 3,244,900 households are to be powered under the project and impacting the lives of 17.5 million Nigerians in the process.
