Dutch development bank FMO has committed $30m in senior debt to M-KOPA Kenya Mobility, the electric motorbike financing unit of African fintech group M-KOPA, to accelerate the shift from petrol motorcycles in Kenya.
The facility, still being finalised, is structured in three tranches: two loans totalling $22.5m provided directly by FMO, and a $7.5m commitment under the bank’s Building Prospects label that will refinance a bridge facility originally extended by an existing shareholder. The fresh capital will primarily fund a growing book of pay-as-you-go receivables tied to electric motorbikes and batteries, with up to $23m earmarked for new originations.
M-KOPA Kenya Mobility was established in 2023 as a separate subsidiary to sell and finance a range of two-wheelers, including the locally assembled Roam Air, the Ampersand Turaco and Spiro battery-swapping bikes, as well as fleet solutions for platforms such as Bolt. Customers pay daily instalments, a model the parent company has honed over more than a decade across solar home systems and, since 2020, smartphones. The e-motorbike loans are bundled with insurance, roadside rescue, theft tracking and a two-year warranty under an “M-KOPA Cares” package.
By providing debt in local currency terms — an acute bottleneck for clean mobility companies in Kenya — the FMO facility is designed to remove a structural barrier that has kept commercial banks on the sidelines. The Dutch lender stated that the transaction “addresses both the lack of clean mobility solutions and financial access to micro-entrepreneurs … and the availability of (local currency) debt financing which is a bottleneck for sector growth.” It is expected to carry 100 per cent Green and 100 per cent Reduced Inequalities labels under FMO’s impact framework.
M-KOPA Group, founded in 2012, reached 10m customers this year across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. It now signs up roughly 10,000 new users a day, driven largely by smartphone financing. Its 40,000-strong agent network and daily repayment engine give the e-mobility unit a ready distribution and credit infrastructure. The group has not disclosed profitability, but revenue has grown at an average annual rate of 50 per cent since 2020, and cumulative credit extended to customers has surpassed $2bn.
The push into electric motorbikes targets a large and politically sensitive market. Kenya has an estimated 2m boda boda motorcycle taxis, most of them fuel-powered. The government has signalled support for electrification through tax incentives and charging infrastructure plans, but high upfront costs and scarce consumer finance have slowed adoption. M-KOPA’s pay-as-you-go model eliminates the upfront purchase price, while daily savings of roughly KSh300 relative to petrol operation strengthen the pitch to riders.
M-KOPA’s chief financial officer, Faraimose Kutadzaushe, has described the group’s underlying customer base — informal workers it calls “Every Day Earners” — as the reason for its rapid scale. “Every Day Earners are why we do this,” he said in a statement released earlier this year. “From our very first customer to this year’s ten millionth, this is proof that a model built for Africa’s Every Day Earners doesn’t just work, it scales and endures.” While those remarks related to the broader business, they underscore the logic of extending the same embedded-finance approach to transport assets.
Once finalised, the debt will lengthen M-KOPA’s funding base at a time when development finance institutions remain the primary source of growth capital for green mobility ventures in sub-Saharan Africa.