British International Investment (BII), the UK’s development finance institution, has committed a $7 million debt facility to Okra Solar, an Australian-founded provider of mesh-grid technology, in a move aimed at accelerating clean electricity access in Nigeria. The financing is structured as working capital, enabling Okra to procure solar panels, batteries and long-lead-time components upfront and in volume, rather than waiting for individual project transactions to close.
The deal, announced at the Global Off-Grid Solar Forum in Kigali, is intended to support approximately 150,000 new mesh-grid connections, with the potential to reach 750,000 people in rural Nigeria who currently lack any electricity access. Okra’s existing installed base stands at more than 13,000 households and over 2.3MW of capacity; the facility is designed to increase its connection count more than tenfold.
A Different Kind of Off-Grid Architecture
Okra’s technology sits between two established but imperfect solutions. Conventional mini-grids — centralised solar-plus-storage plants with distribution networks — can be expensive to deploy in small, dispersed communities because the cost of poles, cables and engineering is borne across a limited customer base. Solar home systems, while cheaper and faster to install, often cannot support productive uses such as milling, welding or irrigation that generate income and underwrite affordability.
Mesh-grids attempt to bridge that gap. Okra’s system connects individual households and businesses with low-voltage DC cables and smart controllers — branded “Okra Pods” — allowing neighbouring units to share surplus power without a central generation house. Distribution costs fall because power travels only short distances between adjacent connections; Okra claims distribution costs can be reduced by up to 90 per cent compared with conventional mini-grids, bringing the average shipped cost of a connection to Nigeria to around $400.
Independent evidence offers qualified support. A 2025 study by CrossBoundary found that full mesh-grid deployments were 41 per cent cheaper than conventional mini-grids and demonstrated reliability above 96 per cent, against 27–60 per cent at mini-grid control sites. However, the same study cautioned that mesh-grids are not universally cheaper: extensions to existing mini-grids were about 45 per cent more expensive, and grid-extension scenarios at the periphery could push mesh-grid costs to $651 per connection against $449 at a mini-grid control site. The implication is that mesh-grids are a targeted tool for sparse, off-grid settlements, not a blanket replacement for all electrification pathways.
The Nigerian Context: A Deficit That Persists
The investment lands in a market where the scale of the challenge is matched only by the difficulty of solving it. Nigeria’s national grid has collapsed at least 222 times since 2010, with a further dozen failures recorded across 2024 and 2025 alone. Manufacturers and businesses spend trillions of naira annually on diesel and petrol generators to keep operations running, a burden that intensified after the removal of fuel subsidies and the liberalisation of the foreign exchange market.
More than 90 million Nigerians still lack access to electricity, according to multiple estimates, and those connected to the grid often receive only a few hours of supply per day. The Rural Electrification Agency has expanded off-grid deployment in recent years, but analysts note that cumulative gains remain modest relative to population growth: fewer than ten million people have gained access since the National Electrification Policy began, even by generous estimates.
The Nigerian government’s flagship response is the $750 million Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES) programme, implemented by the Rural Electrification Agency with World Bank support. DARES aims to connect 3.2 million households over five years and is the first government grant initiative to explicitly include mesh-grids, offering results-based financing for verified connections. For Okra and its developer customers, faster equipment delivery under the BII facility is intended to bring projects online sooner and allow developers to claim DARES grant payments earlier, reducing their financing costs.
The Financing Bottleneck
BII’s facility targets a constraint that is often overlooked in debates about technology: access to flexible working capital. Off-grid energy companies typically operate on thin margins and cannot easily pre-finance inventory. Without upfront procurement, equipment orders are placed only after a project agreement is signed, in batches of a few thousand units, extending delivery times to Nigeria to around four months.
Afnan Hannan, Okra’s chief executive, said the new facility allows the company to procure components “upfront and in volume,” reducing costs and ensuring stock is ready when a developer signs. “Equipment reaches Nigeria in less than one-third of the time — getting the lights on sooner,” he said. Geoffrey Manley, BII’s head of infrastructure and climate debt for Africa and South Asia, framed the intervention as a test of commercial viability: “For innovative energy companies such as Okra, access to the right type of finance can be just as important as the technology itself… We believe this will help demonstrate the commercial viability of mesh-grids and establish the model as an increasingly important part of Africa’s distributed renewable energy market”.
The facility qualifies as 100 per cent climate finance and under the 2X Challenge for women’s empowerment, aligning with BII’s 2026–31 strategy, which targets at least 40 per cent of new commitments in climate finance and 30 per cent in gender-lens investing. BII has deployed similar working-capital structures in Nigeria before — including a $7.5 million facility with Odyssey Energy Solutions in 2025 to support mini-grid procurement — suggesting a deliberate approach of using supply-chain finance to unblock distributed energy deployment.
What to Watch
Okra is not a new entrant. Founded in 2016, it raised a $12 million Series A in 2023 led by At One Ventures, with participation from FMO and the Autodesk Foundation, and has deployed mesh-grids in four countries. Its B2B model — selling hardware and software to last-mile energy utilities rather than serving households directly — means its growth depends on the health of Nigeria’s developer ecosystem, which remains fragmented and exposed to currency volatility and policy delays.
The BII facility is a bet that removing a procurement bottleneck can catalyse that ecosystem. But the harder questions remain unresolved: whether DARES grant payments will arrive on schedule, whether the Nigerian naira will stabilise sufficiently for developers to finance imported equipment, and whether mesh-grids can maintain their cost advantage as deployments move from early adopter sites to more challenging terrain. For the 90 million Nigerians without power, the answers will determine whether this financing marks a genuine acceleration or another incremental step in a long-running effort.