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When ‘Patient Capital’ isn’t Patient Enough: How Mismatched Funder Timelines in PAYGo Solar are Holding Back Energy Access in Africa
The energy access conversation in Africa is usually framed around deployment, with success defined by connection targets, cost reduction and rural reach. But Kolawole Osinowo at the FATE Institute argues that these goals don't address a binding constraint for companies working at the last mile: the time it takes for households to repay the solar assets they bought via PAYGo financing. As he explains, the PAYGo model spreads out payments for the benefit of the consumer, but it adds the cost of waiting to the provider’s balance sheet — and that cost later spreads to the company’s investors. And though much of the capital that supports energy access presents itself as patient, willing to wait for these PAYGo assets to be repaid, in practice, these investors often behave otherwise. He discusses the impacts of this mismatch, and explores how capital can be structured for better alignment with PAYGo timelines.
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D.light Takes PAYGo Solar From Impact Funds to the London Stock Exchange
The listing brings d.light’s cumulative PAYGo receivables purchasing capacity to $1 billion — a milestone that few in the off-grid energy sector thought achievable when the company pioneered the first-ever PAYGo securitisation back in 2020.
- Categories
- Energy, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Record Sales Highlight Off-Grid Solar’s Critical Role in Electrification
The East Africa region and Nigeria experienced the highest sales, with subsidies and results-based financing (RBF) programmes helping expand affordability and accelerate market expansion, pushing sales of products purchased through pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) up by almost 50%.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Selling the Outcome, Not Just the Appliance: What the Clean Cooling Sector Can Learn from Clean Cooking
The demand for cooling solutions will more than triple by 2050 — and based on current technologies and strategies, this increase will almost double cooling-related greenhouse gas emissions, worsening the very crisis that's driving this growth. Colm Fay, Ekta Jhaveri and Rajat Chabba at the William Davidson Institute (WDI) explore how sustainable cooling solutions could meet this rising demand, while cutting emissions by nearly two-thirds. To achieve that ambitious goal, they argue that the clean cooling sector should leverage the experience of the off-grid solar and clean cooking industries. They share insights from a new WDI report that highlights what clean cooling can learn from both the successes — and the flawed assumptions — of these sectors.
- Categories
- Energy
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SolarAid CEO John Keane is Stepping Down
SolarAid today announced that its Chief Executive Officer, John Keane, has decided to step down from his role in June
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Announcing NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2025: Vote for Your Favorites by Jan. 4
NextBillion’s “Most Influential Articles of the Year” contest has been an annual tradition since 2012. As we do each December, we’ve highlighted 12 of our most-read articles from the past year: You can find links to them in this article, or on the homepage below. We invite you to read them and vote for the ones that influenced your thinking the most. You can vote up to once per hour between today (Dec. 19) and 11:59 pm EST on Jan. 4. We thank you for your support and engagement over these past 20 years, and we wish you a happy and prosperous 2026.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation
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Financing Off-Grid Solar: A Pioneering Provider in Honduras Shows the Impact of Diversified Funding
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and many of its most remote regions remain unserved by the electricity grid. Richenda Van Leeuwen at Hummingbird Green Solutions and Richard Stuebi and Jesse Colman at Boston University explore how Soluz Honduras is bringing freezers and other solar products to these markets by leveraging a variety of different financing models — an approach that shows how diversified funding can enable businesses to serve even the hardest-to-reach areas and the poorest of customers.
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Pay-As-You-Go Solar Kit Sales Surge 54% in Sub-Saharan Africa in H1 2025
The report shows that PAYGo sales, where customers purchase solar kits in installments, surpassed cash sales for the first time since 2018.
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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