Nigeria launched a $300 million fund to finance distributed renewable energy projects, focusing on mini-grids, off-grid solar systems and other solutions for areas where grid electricity supply remains limited or unreliable.
The vehicle, called the Distributed Renewable Energy Fund (DRE Fund) , was promoted by the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) , Africa50 and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), and is part of Mission 300 , the initiative that seeks to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.
According to the NSIA, the fund's commercial launch reflected greater market maturity and improved investor confidence in Nigeria's distributed renewables segment.
The initiative also seeks to become a replicable model in other African countries, precisely because one of the main limits to the growth of off-grid solar remains access to capital.
Nigeria aims to lead the regional off-grid solar sector
The launch comes in a market with very aggressive growth prospects.
Wood Mackenzie projects that the sub-Saharan African off-grid solar market will grow by around 450% by 2035 , multiplying total installed capacity sixfold.
Within that scenario, Nigeria could concentrate about 35% of the off-grid solar installations in the entire region.
BloombergNEF also identifies the country as the fastest-growing small-scale solar market in sub-Saharan Africa and estimates that its cumulative solar capacity could reach 87 GW by 2035 , driven by households and businesses seeking alternatives to an unreliable grid and the high cost of diesel.
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That last factor is especially accelerating corporate and community demand.
Wood Mackenzie points out that the solar-as-a-service model may already be more competitive than diesel generation, but warns that high financial costs and regulatory uncertainty continue to hinder expansion.
The fund seeks to close the financing gap
The DRE Fund was created precisely to address that bottleneck.
The structure includes an initial contribution of USD 25 million from the World Bank's International Development Association (IDA) and was presented as the first country-level demonstration linked to a continental-scale financing platform.
The logic is to combine public and private capital to reduce risk, facilitate access to financing, and scale up distributed projects.
Ashish Khanna, CEO of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), argued that the model and associated knowledge transfer can be replicated in other African markets to unlock large-scale investment.
The fund also joins other recent initiatives.
In May 2026, the Green Finance and Investment Facility launched a USD 188 million financing package for 188.4 MW of distributed solar projects, structured into 12 lots.
This program also includes the development of 40 interconnected mini-grids under the Nigeria Distributed Access Through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES) project, with the aim of mobilizing additional private investment.