By Shantha Bloemen
A farmer collecting her tomato harvets.. (C) Aaron Ufumeli AP 2025
To find the capital that @MobilityforAfrica needs to expand and go to scale, I spent the past two weeks on the road: First to Lusaka for the meeting of the The World Bank Group EnergyEnergy Sector Management Assistance Program and the Africa Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA) . Then I headed to Kampala for the Alliance for Rural Electrification Energy Access Investment Forum.
This is the latest journey in the perpetual door-knocking I have been doing since the launch of the pilot test of the Hamba e-tricycles using a minigrid-charging and battery system in 2019 in rural Zimbabwe. Although we now have a proven and winning formula, including the technology for building rural minigrids, bespoke multipurpose batteries for storage and rural mobility, a model to de-risk small-scale farmers through agriculture actors, plus the skills-building needed to sustain and maintain our rural e-tricycle fleets, we do not have the capital required to go to scale in Zimbabwe and to expand into other markets in Africa.
Starting a pilot in Zimbabwe, as my son (a Zimbabwean citizen) repeatedly pointed out, most probably was not the best place to leverage the flexible capital needed to build technology or test a new business model. Although capital is scarce and expensive across the continent, some countries have a favoured status and nuance that tends to attracted what funding is available. Zimbabwe is not among them. When I started I was optimistic and ambitious. Nearly six years into this entrepreneurial journey to help relieve a major problem of transport for rural farmers, especially the women who are the backbone of the continent's food security and labour force, I am still ambitious but now perhaps a bit more realistic about the challenges. Mobility for Africa is at a crossroad: We either get larger financing or, like many other social enterprises, we die. Not because our business model is weak but because we are capital-heavy, and asset financing is tough to find.
MFA technology - Tested and designed from real time experience on rough rocky roads.
In Lusaka and Kampala, I met passionate and committed people in the fight against climate change and to making green transitions. But as many people conceded, the existing finance mechanisms are too complex, slow and lack the risk required to act with the urgency Mobility for Africa requires.
From those two meetings, here are my takeaway conclusions:
Climate finance is too slow and complicated
Getting money to scale up an enterprise is tough. Everyone wants a big-ticket endeavour, yet the hurdles to qualify leave most of us swimming upstream. Only a few companies are well-positioned to attract the greater finance.
In the minigrid and renewable energy sector, millions of dollars have been invested in a few companies. They seem to have convinced the managers of the development finance institution-supported impact funds that they have the proven formula for flooding Africa with home solar systems or rural connectivity through minigrids that connect villages in a 2 km radius from the source of power.
While access to energy is critical to the continent's development, it appears the bulk of the funds are designed with a top-down siloed approach that seems to echo similar failures of the aid industry over the past 70 years. The biggest problem, though, they do not seem to be listening enough to or even inquiring of their potential customers, especially in rural areas, what they need.
A singular approach to defining access to energy
While I heard repeatedly that there are 600 million people without access to energy in Africa and while I heard much about the new ambitious #Mission300 target, I heard very little about the people whose lives need to be transformed not by access to energy but rather by the use of it. This link would provide them with more hours in their day so they could mechanize the drudgery or stimulate local economies or change gender inequality.
Measuring results by connections and consumption
Minigrids were the focus of the meeting in Lusaka. It was all about connections, and when I say connections I mean laying copper cables and installing metering devices in rural areas at houses far from the fields or the markets where people earn their livelihood. Connections and selling kWh of energy to rural people within a 2–5 km area around the grid is important but cannot be our only measure of connection – it reflects an assumption that these households need a fridge or a TV. It appears there has been no consultation with rural women in a rural community. If asked, they will tell you that the men watch football on TV late at night but it is the women who must get up early and fetch water. They don’t need kWh, especially if it is cost three times what households pay in an urban area. They need transport to their field; they need mechanized tools to reduce the agriculture tasks; they need cold storage aggregation to reduce post-harvest loss; and then they need mechanized tools to dry, freeze, pickle and create new value to their produce that they can then sell beyond their villages.
Another reality that appears overlooked by these “connectors” is that copper cables are extremely valuable and are, along with the transformers, stolen at an alarming rate. We experience this in Johannesburg, resulting in constant breakdowns in energy transmission that leave large urban areas in the dark. Even the energy ministers at the Southern African Development Coordination Conference meeting in Botswana in February joked that anyone selling you copper outside Zambia should be treated with suspicion.
Wedza Charging station with our locally trainied technicans. (C) Aaron Ufumeli AP 2025.
Productive-Use Energy
To make minigrids financially viable, there is a new focus: The conversation has moved from how we introduce connections for consumption to finding ways to make those connections productive. But it’s a murky focus so far, with talk about powering up mills and small businesses, for example. The conversations are only starting to include transport. But in rural communities, as Mobility for Africa has learned from talking with farmers, people typically live a few kilometres from their fields and have no mechanized tools to increase their yields or irrigate their crops. Transport in these rural areas is the most important productive-use energy for a small-scale farmer, saving them money for post-harvest loss, allowing them to get seed and fertilizer to their field and improving their access to the market. The cost of buying transport services often eats into their small profit. We at Mobility for Africa have been mapping the agricultural value chain and working with the dairy, cotton, sorghum associations and listening to their needs and what types of power tools can increase yields, save their time and improve their incomes.
In those conversations in Lusaka and Kampala, no one seemed to know where our model of servicing a 30 km-rural radius with mobile energy and mobility through battery swapping fitted in. Could it count as a connection without a copper cable? For the most part, the answer is no. But the bigger concern is that no one seemed to see powering transport capacity where this are limited options as the productive use of energy.
Quantity over quality
Speed to meet the SDG targets by 2030 was stressed, and the need for commitments to translate into finance was echoed by many minigrid developers. But discussions around supply chain, technology transfer and skills-building were few and far between.
We all know China is galloping ahead in the green energy transition, yet there was no discussion on how to leverage their partnership in developing local industry and engaging in technology transfer. The mantra seemed to be connections first and then we focus on how we service, maintain and recycle. Discussion on the deliberate skills-building and technology transfer strategies required to create these industries in the continent - something we are doing at Mobility for Africa – was secondary to measuring numbers.
Women left to the margin of the conversation
There were women in the room in both meetings, but the gender focus was a conversation in a silo. There was no real substance about how the men control and benefit most from the energy connections or the motorbikes being made available or the generator that keeps the music blasting at the local pub while the women continue their daily drudgery of growing the food, feeding the children and paying the school fees. The agnostic approach to energy means we may miss the opportunity this investment could catalyse to address gender inequality.
In short, although these meetings left me deflated, these challenges are all part of the Hamba journey. We are going forward. Having these conversations helps clarify our challenges and will help inform the route we take next to deliver Hambas across rural communities and to drive a catalytic shift in rural economies.