ABA Editorial · Nov 12, 2025 · 15 min read
Seven operators (Sun King, Zola Electric, M-KOPA, Bboxx, d.light, Engie Energy Access, and Lumos) account for approximately 72 percent of investment in African pay-as-you-go solar. Sun King serves nearly 10 million customers. M-KOPA has extended over USD 1.5 billion in credit to more than 5 million customers. The sector has reached maturity but also consolidation. This report maps the off-grid solar ecosystem, the financing that has enabled its growth, and the structural questions the sector now faces.
The African off-grid solar sector reached a kind of maturity in 2025 that would have been hard to predict a decade earlier. The seven largest operators now serve approximately 10 million individual customers between them, have collectively attracted over USD 3 billion in capital across their histories, and have built distribution networks that extend into rural areas where traditional utility infrastructure does not reach. The sector is also experiencing consolidation: shake-outs, acquisitions, and pivots have narrowed the competitive field substantially over the last five years. This report maps where the off-grid solar category sits in 2026, the financing innovations that have defined the last year, and the structural questions the sector still needs to answer.
According to the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA) investment database, seven scaleups account for approximately 72 percent of investment in African pay-as-you-go solar: Sun King, Zola Electric, M-KOPA, Bboxx, d.light, Engie Energy Access, and Lumos. Over 150 early-stage startups compete for the remaining 28 percent of capital across the sector. This concentration has emerged over the last decade as the operators with the strongest unit economics, supply chain infrastructure, and financing relationships have pulled ahead of smaller competitors.
Sun King, formerly known as Greenlight Planet, is the largest operator by customer count. The company serves nearly 10 million individual customers across Africa and Asia and has sold over 27 million solar products through its history. Sun King raised USD 330 million in equity funding in 2022 and has since added substantial debt financing. In July 2025, it closed a USD 156 million securitization deal to expand its pay-as-you-go solar services in Kenya, the largest off-grid solar securitization to date in Africa. The deal was backed by Citi and supports the deployment of over 1.5 million solar systems expected to bring electricity to more than 6 million people.
M-KOPA is the Kenya-based operator that arguably started the modern PAYG solar category when co-founders Jesse Moore and Nick Hughes sketched out the business model on a whiteboard in London in May 2010, with pilot sales beginning in Kenya two months later. By 2024, M-KOPA had extended over USD 1.5 billion in credit to more than 5 million customers across its markets (Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana), employed over 3,000 staff, and supported over 30,000 sales agents. The company has been ranked on the Financial Times Africa's Fastest Growing Companies list three years in a row in 2022, 2023, and 2024. M-KOPA's particular innovation has been cross-selling: customers who begin with a solar home system can later access smartphones, refrigerators, televisions, digital loans, health insurance, and other products through the same daily micro-payment infrastructure. Smartphones have become particularly important, with M-KOPA selling approximately 500,000 smartphones in eighteen months after launching the product, compared to the ten years it took the company to reach 1 million solar home system customers.
Bboxx operates as a hybrid platform combining solar home systems with digital services and partnerships with telecom operators. The company secured a headline USD 100 million investment reported in recent years and in 2025 Bboxx Nigeria obtained access to World Bank-backed financing for Nigerian expansion. Bboxx's differentiation lies in co-packaging energy with connectivity through telco partnerships and embedded finance, a strategy reflected in its Orange partnership in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other country programmes. The company secured a loan from SBM Bank Kenya to expand its solar services to 470,000 rural Kenyans.
d.light is one of the oldest operators in the category, founded alongside Greenlight Planet (now Sun King) in the same founding cohort. The company reports revenue of approximately USD 217 to USD 309 million annually and has continued to raise both equity and debt financing to support ongoing expansion. Engie Energy Access, the subsidiary of French utility Engie focused on African off-grid markets, operates across multiple African countries and brings the advantage of parent company balance sheet support. Zola Electric and Lumos round out the list of operators who have captured significant market share.
The capital structure of African off-grid solar has evolved substantially over the last two years. Historically, the sector relied on equity raises from impact-focused investors targeting 20 to 40 percent returns and catalytic capital from foundations, development finance institutions, and results-based financing programmes. This capital was sufficient to build early customer bases but could not fund the working capital needs of operators scaling to millions of customers.
The innovation has been local-currency debt, asset-backed securitization, and commercial bank participation. Sun King's July 2025 USD 156 million securitization is the flagship example: the structure converts small, daily mobile money payments from rural customers into large-scale funding streams that commercial investors can fund. The May 2025 Sun King / IFC / Stanbic IBTC facility of USD 80 million provides further debt capital for Nigerian expansion. M-KOPA received USD 255 million in financing in 2023, including a USD 200 million debt portion backed by Mirova SunFunder, Standard Bank, and multiple development finance institutions, with terms linked to specific growth targets including electric vehicle financing and gender-based lending to women customers. Bboxx secured SBM Bank Kenya debt financing. d.light has raised USD 50 million in debt alongside equity. Bboxx added USD 35.5 million in additional debt.
The underlying operating model across all of these operators is similar. A customer pays a small deposit (typically USD 20 to USD 50 depending on the product) and then makes daily or weekly micro-payments through mobile money until they have paid off the full cost of the solar home system, at which point they own the hardware outright. The payment periods typically run 12 to 24 months. During the payment period, the hardware is remotely locked if the customer falls behind, and unlocked when they catch up. This remote lock capability is the technical innovation that makes PAYG solar work as a financing product: it converts what would otherwise be expensive and difficult-to-enforce consumer credit into a much simpler "pay or lose access" arrangement.
The model generates enormous volumes of small payments. M-KOPA reported receiving over 30 million micro-payments per year at one point in its history, roughly one payment per second across the customer base. The operational infrastructure required to handle this payment flow, combined with customer service, field sales, logistics, and after-sales support, is what distinguishes the seven largest operators from the smaller competitors who cannot scale the operational systems.
Not all analysis of the PAYG sector is positive. A November 2025 analysis from the Energy for Growth Hub raised structural concerns about the model, arguing that off-grid solar operators depend on expensive commercial capital (typical investor return targets of 20 to 40 percent, and lending rates of 10 to 20 percent or more in many African markets) and therefore pass high per-kilowatt-hour costs to the rural customers who can least afford them. The analysis noted that a wealthy urban household in Nairobi or Lagos pays grid tariffs subsidized by the government, while a rural household using off-grid solar bears higher per-unit electricity costs, financing charges, and total cost of ownership. The argument is that PAYG solar works for customer segments with higher incomes (productive-use appliances, commercial and industrial solar, peri-urban markets) but cannot be the default strategy for electrifying the poorest households without substantial public subsidy alongside.
This critique is substantive and reflects a broader tension in the Mission 300 framework: the reliance on commercial capital to deliver universal access is historically unprecedented, and most successful rural electrification programmes globally (Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Vietnam, China, the United States) have been state-led, publicly financed efforts where private companies complemented rather than replaced public investment.
Three questions will define the next phase of African off-grid solar. First, whether the securitization model pioneered by Sun King in Kenya is replicated in other countries, unlocking commercial bank participation at scale across the continent. Second, whether the cross-selling strategy that has worked for M-KOPA (expanding from solar into smartphones, motorcycles, insurance, and digital financial services) is adopted by other operators or remains a single-operator advantage. Third, whether the combination of private PAYG deployment and public grid extension can, in combination, close the access gap by 2030 or whether the Energy for Growth Hub critique proves correct that commercial models alone cannot reach the poorest customers. The answers to these questions will shape whether off-grid solar is remembered as the innovation that electrified rural Africa or as a partial solution that worked for some but not all of the customers who needed it.