Nigeria is set to benefit from a $50 million agricultural project funded by world bank, aimed at boosting farm productivity, enhancing food security, and supporting rural livelihoods across the country.
A new initiative, announced through programme updates involving the World Bank and its development partners, including the Rockefeller Foundation, aims to deploy solar-powered agricultural equipment across Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to a Bloomberg report, the funding will support the rollout of solar-powered cold rooms, refrigerators, water pumps, and grain mills, helping farmers overcome persistent challenges related to poor storage, unreliable electricity, and limited access to modern processing tools.
Agriculture employs more than a third of Nigeria’s workforce, yet inefficiencies across the value chain continue to erode farmers’ incomes and threaten food security.
Experts note that the expansion of solar-backed solutions could significantly strengthen the country’s agricultural system by reducing post-harvest losses caused by inadequate storage and power shortages.
The project will be implemented by Clasp, a Washington, DC–based non-profit organisation focused on energy efficiency and expanding access to clean energy technologies in emerging markets.
Financing comes through the Productive Use Financing Facility (PUFF), an initiative under Mission 300, a flagship programme jointly supported by the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Mission 300 seeks to mobilise tens of billions of dollars to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030.
Development partners have indicated that the initiative has potential for further scale-up as implementation progresses at the country level. The Rockefeller Foundation, which has already committed $12 million to the programme, has signalled its readiness to provide additional funding.
During a visit to a solar-powered cold storage facility operated by SokoFresh in Nairobi, the foundation’s president, Rajiv Shah, highlighted the ability to expand the project further.
He noted that the foundation supports early-stage innovations that governments and multilateral institutions can later scale, explaining, “We finance the innovations, the new projects, and the new ideas that governments, the World Bank, and others can then take to scale.”
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the global epicentre of energy poverty, with more than 80 per cent of the world’s population without electricity.
An estimated 600 million people in the region still lack reliable power, limiting productivity for farmers and small businesses.
PUFF is designed to address this gap by providing grants, subsidies, and technical assistance to suppliers and distributors of solar-powered equipment, enabling them to reach rural and off-grid communities that are often excluded from traditional financing.
Between 2022 and 2024, PUFF completed a two-year pilot phase, supporting 24 businesses across the six participating countries. With the pilot concluded, the programme is now moving into full-scale deployment, backed by fresh World Bank funding and philanthropic capital.
