African Frontier Capital has secured backing from four development finance institutions for a securitisation warehouse facility that targets up to $125m in institutional capital for distributed renewable energy, electric mobility and productive-use equipment across sub-Saharan Africa, the Mauritius-based specialist lender said on Wednesday.
The AFC RAMP Warehouse Facility, structured through a Luxembourg securitisation vehicle and a Mauritius protected cell company, is designed to purchase customer receivables from multiple originators within ring-fenced portfolios, allowing companies that have traditionally relied on corporate debt and equity to access off-balance-sheet financing. The facility is expected to raise up to $100m in senior debt and up to $25m in subordinated debt, with the junior tranche providing credit enhancement to senior lenders.
The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector arm, is supporting the facility alongside Norfund, Norway’s development finance institution; the African Development Bank, through its Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa and the Clean Technology Fund; and the Soros Economic Development Fund. IFC’s contribution is further supported by the International Development Association’s Private Sector Window blended-finance facility and concessional capital window. Standard Bank Group is providing cross-border financial services and security agency capabilities.
The facility is now evaluating eligible investment opportunities, with a first transaction expected to close in the coming weeks, AFC said.
From solar receivables to e-mobility
The platform represents an extension of a model AFC has refined over more than a decade in the pay-as-you-go solar sector. Founded in 2010 by former Citigroup investment banker Eric De Moudt, AFC has purchased more than $500m of distributed renewable energy assets to date and has established itself as the largest provider of off-balance-sheet securitisation structures to PAYGo companies in Africa. In June, the firm completed a $50m guaranteed green bond private placement, arranged by Standard Chartered and rated BBB by Fitch, that was listed on the London Stock Exchange’s International Securities Market.
The new facility broadens that mandate. While the initial pipeline is expected to be weighted towards solar home systems and productive-use equipment such as solar irrigation pumps, AFC is explicitly targeting e-mobility — a sector that is attracting growing attention from development financiers but remains constrained by the absence of asset-backed debt structures at scale.
The need is acute. Africa’s electric two-wheeler market is shifting from pilot projects to commercial platforms, but financing remains misaligned with the operational realities of the sector. A white paper published this year by the University of Michigan’s William Davidson Institute and Intellecap found that the bottleneck is “not technology or demand; it’s capital,” with consumers facing asset costs too high for price-sensitive markets and lending products poorly designed for informal-income riders. Debt-labelled transactions accounted for 36.7 per cent of disclosed capital in Africa in the first half of 2026, up from 18.5 per cent a year earlier, and e-mobility deals tripled over the same period as lenders began to treat batteries, vehicles and receivables as collateralisable assets.
“Access to working capital is a key constraint for companies bringing renewable energy to underserved markets,” said Birgit Edlefsen, senior vice-president for renewable energy at Norfund. “By helping scale this securitisation platform, Norfund is supporting more efficient financing that lets PAYGo companies grow.”
A different securitisation architecture
The facility’s multi-originator design is central to its ambition. Rather than requiring each company to establish its own financing vehicle — a costly and time-consuming process that has historically confined securitisation to the largest PAYGo operators — the warehouse aggregates multiple originators within a common platform. Participating businesses sell eligible customer receivables into dedicated cells, releasing capital tied up in operating assets while giving investors exposure to diversified portfolios of African assets.
De Moudt described the structure as “a scalable securitisation platform that fundamentally changes how institutional capital can reach African businesses,” adding that the support of the four DFIs “marks an important milestone in our ambition to establish securitisation as a mainstream financing solution for distributed energy, e-mobility and other essential services across Africa.”
The facility is funded in US dollars but is structured to provide participating operators with local-currency liquidity against locally generated customer cash flows, with foreign-exchange risk managed within the financing structure. That feature addresses a persistent complaint from African lenders and operators, who have long identified currency mismatch as a deterrent to long-term local-currency financing.
Development finance’s blended bet
The involvement of four DFIs reflects a broader push by development institutions to use blended finance and structured credit to mobilise private capital for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 7 on energy access. The World Bank and the African Development Bank’s joint Mission 300 initiative aims to connect 300 million people in Africa to electricity by 2030, a programme expected to require about $238bn in financing, with roughly half projected to come from private-sector investors.
Aliou Maiga, IFC’s regional industry director for financial institutions in Africa, said the facility could “help scale the businesses delivering that access” by expanding solar energy and equipment financing for livelihoods and enterprise. Daniel Schroth, the AfDB’s director for renewable energy and energy efficiency, said the facility had the potential to “transform off-grid solar financing by unlocking much-needed capital.”
The concessional layers — IFC’s IDA Private Sector Window and the AfDB’s SEFA and CTF funding — are intended to absorb first-loss risk and make the senior tranches attractive to institutional investors who might otherwise view African receivables as too risky or too small to underwrite. Georgia Levenson Keohane, chief executive of SEDF, said the facility would “expand access to affordable capital for distributed energy service companies” serving low-income and rural communities.
The timing problem
Yet the enthusiasm around securitisation as a solution to Africa’s distributed-energy financing gap is not universally shared. Critics point out that structured facilities can take 12 to 18 months to close, from origination and due diligence through legal documentation and credit rating. In a sector where a typical PAYGo portfolio breaks even in nine to 12 months and growth depends on the speed with which capital can be recycled into new receivables, a facility that arrives after a full portfolio cycle can impose an opportunity cost that outweighs its lower headline cost of capital.
“In off-grid solar, the most important variable in finance is not sophistication. It is timing,” wrote one industry analyst in a recent assessment of securitisation in the sector. “Cheaper capital delivered too late can easily cost more than expensive capital delivered on time”.
The portfolio-quality risk that deters some mainstream investors also remains. “The biggest risk that still deters mainstream investors is the portfolio quality risk,” an industry participant told Washington Post in July, referring to the possibility of loans not performing as expected. Securitisation also carries fixed legal, regulatory and guarantee costs that can make it uneconomical for smaller firms.
AFC’s answer is scale and standardisation. By aggregating multiple originators and reusing documentation and diligence processes across transactions, the warehouse model aims to compress the time and cost of bringing new receivables into the facility. The firm’s track record — five receivables financing facilities in Africa and a portfolio of more than $500m — offers some evidence that repayment rates and default risk in PAYGo portfolios are predictable enough to support institutional-grade structures.
A crowded field for e-mobility debt
The facility enters a financing landscape that is becoming more competitive. In October, US-based climate fintech Nithio launched a $150m senior secured debt fund, FUEL, targeting e-mobility and supporting infrastructure with loans of $2m to $15m backed by hard assets and cash flows. The World Bank is developing a proposed $250m blended-finance equity fund for commercially proven e-mobility business models, and Afreximbank and IFC have become active lenders to the sector.
Nithio’s fund will need a diversified loan book, yet “the universe of creditworthy e-mobility borrowers in Africa remains thin,” according to an analysis of the launch. Spiro, one of the largest electric-mobility platforms, accounted for more than a quarter of all disclosed capital in the first half of 2026. AFC’s multi-originator structure is designed in part to mitigate that concentration problem by pooling receivables across a broader set of operators and asset types.
The scale of the opportunity is substantial. Africa’s electric two-wheeler sales jumped from under 1,000 to more than 70,000 in a single year, according to industry data, and the total Kenyan electric two-wheeler market alone could reach $1bn to $4.5bn by 2035. But capital flows remain concentrated among a small number of well-capitalised players, leaving smaller fleet operators, charging networks and battery-swapping companies underserved.
What to watch
AFC’s first transaction under the facility will be scrutinised as a test of whether a multi-originator warehouse can deliver capital at the speed the sector requires, and whether the local-currency structure functions as intended in practice. The identities of the first participating originators — and whether they include e-mobility platforms alongside solar companies — will signal how quickly AFC can pivot the platform toward its new mandate.
The facility’s $125m target is also modest relative to the scale of the financing gap. AfDB project documents separately reference a $300m household solar receivables warehousing facility that AFC is establishing, suggesting the $125m warehouse may be an initial phase within a larger platform. AFC did not clarify the relationship between the two figures.
For now, the facility’s significance lies less in its size than in its architecture. If it works, it offers a template for how development capital can be used to build securitisation markets around African cash flows that are predictable, local-currency-denominated and too small individually to interest institutional investors. If it does not, it will reinforce the scepticism of those who argue that the sector’s financing gap is better addressed through simpler, faster on-balance-sheet lending.
Standard Bank’s Andrew Mashanda, executive head of business and commercial banking for Africa regions and offshore, framed the facility as a test of whether “innovative financing, supported by strong transactional infrastructure, can unlock real opportunities.” The coming months will show whether the warehouse can convert that promise into deployed capital.