Africa’s biggest mini-grid solar company thinks big

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Africa’s largest solar mini-grid company is expanding into Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to increase its customer base tenfold. WeLight already operates in Madagascar and Mali. Its expansion is supported by the World Bank as part of a drive to bring power to 300m Africans by 2030. Half of the new power generated by this programme will come from extending national power grids. But this process is expensive and impractical for electrifying rural communities. The cost of connecting remote villages in Ethiopia, for example, is an estimated $8bn – more than half its annual budget. Mini-grids, by contrast, are cheap and fast to build. They comprise banks of batteries, charged by solar panels or another power source.