Nigeria’s flagship off-grid electrification programme secured another round of international financing in June 2026, the latest signal that distributed renewable energy has become the centre of gravity in the country’s effort to close its power gap. The additional $242.9 million, concluded with the Federal Government on 4 June, flows into the Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up project, known as DARES.
DARES launched in December 2023 as a $750 million World Bank credit, the largest single distributed-energy project the Bank has financed anywhere, with the goal of giving 17.5 million Nigerians new or improved access to electricity through solar mini-grids and stand-alone solar systems. It is structured to leverage more than $1 billion of private capital, alongside co-financing from partners including JICA, the IFC, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, USAID and the African Development Bank.
Implemented by the Rural Electrification Agency and building on the earlier Nigeria Electrification Project, the programme is deliberately private-sector-led, intended to replace more than 280,000 polluting diesel and petrol generators and supply up to 237,000 micro, small and medium enterprises with reliable power for productive use.
The June top-up arrives as delivery accelerates. More than $430 million of total funds are now committed, and the project has reached 5.3 million Nigerians, up from 3.6 million only months earlier, with solar home-system deployments passing one million units. Installed renewable capacity stood at around 41 MW against a 465 MW target, with the programme due to close in December 2028. Converting fresh capital into connected communities, observers note, will depend on regulatory and macroeconomic conditions and on the policy certainty a national electrification strategy is expected to bring.
Why this matters
Institutional validation of the distributed model
DARES is more than a development-finance headline. It is institutional validation, at the billion-dollar scale, of the exact thesis Nova is built on: that Nigeria will be electrified not by waiting for the national grid, but by distributed generation delivered next to demand by private developers. When the World Bank structures its largest-ever distributed-energy project around mini-grids, embedded generation and commercial offtake, it is confirming that the model is bankable rather than experimental.
For developers, the significance is twofold. First, DARES and its co-financiers represent a deep, growing pool of capital actively seeking credible distributed-energy projects, counterparties able to withstand institutional diligence and meet international environmental and social standards. Second, the programme’s focus on displacing diesel and powering MSMEs maps directly onto Nova’s commercial and industrial base. Capital and policy momentum are converging on precisely the segment Nova occupies, and the question is no longer whether distributed energy will be funded, but which developers are ready to receive it.