Off-grid solar providers are using mobile payments and instalment financing to widen access to electricity across sub-Saharan Africa, according to an analysis published by Climate Drift. The model replaces a large upfront equipment purchase with smaller recurring payments, offering households and farms an alternative where extending the conventional power grid is slow or uneconomic.
The analysis puts the regional access problem at roughly 600 million people without reliable electricity. It argues that remote rural homes are difficult for utilities to serve because new generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure must be paid for across customers with limited monthly spending. Climate Drift estimates that connecting one rural household can cost from $266 to $2,000, compared with typical electricity spending of about $10 to $20 a month. Those figures are the publication’s estimates and are not independently corroborated in the supplied evidence.
Falling equipment costs form the first part of the proposed solution. The article charts solar-panel prices dropping from about $40 per watt in 1980 to $0.20 per watt in 2025. It also says battery prices declined by 90%, while cheaper inverters, more efficient LED lighting, Chinese manufacturing and improved African logistics reduced the price of complete home systems. Its indicative range for such systems in 2025 is $120 to $1,200, down from $5,000 in 2008.
Even lower hardware prices can remain inaccessible when a customer earns only a few dollars a day. Climate Drift identifies mobile money as the next essential layer. Kenya’s M-PESA service, launched by Safaricom in 2007, created a way to collect very small digital payments. The publication says 70% of Kenyans used mobile money by 2025 and cites daily payments as low as $0.21 to illustrate how transaction costs can be spread over time.
Pay-as-you-go solar connects that payment rail to the physical equipment. Under the model described, a provider such as Sun King or SunCulture installs a system, takes a deposit and collects instalments for roughly two to two-and-a-half years. A GSM-connected controller can verify payments and switch the equipment off after a missed payment. Once the agreed term is complete, the customer owns the system.
Climate Drift reports more than 30 million solar products sold in 2024 and around 400,000 new installations each month across Africa. It also cites repayment rates above 90%. Because the supplied material comes from a single climate-transition publication, these totals should be understood as its assessment of the market rather than independently audited statistics.
The broader significance is the combination of technologies. Affordable panels alone do not solve financing, and mobile money alone does not generate power. Together with connected metering and instalment ownership, however, they provide a distributed infrastructure model that can grow without every household first receiving a grid connection.
