Congo’s Planned $500 Million Off-Grid Fund to Start Disbursing
(Bloomberg) -- The World Bank-backed Mwinda Fund, which could become Africa’s second-largest financial facility for off-grid power projects, expects to start disbursing money in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the first quarter of next year.
The fund, to be managed by GreenMax Capital Group and grow to $500 million over three years, aims to boost electrification in a country with the world’s second-largest number of people without access to power after Nigeria.
The facility is part of a World Bank-backed program known as Mission 300 that seeks to connect 300 million people in Africa to electricity by 2030 by investing tens of billions of dollars. Of the 680 million people without access to power globally 84% are in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We think there is enough interest in Congo,” said Clifford Aron, founder and chief executive officer of GreenMax, a Dublin-based sustainable development fund manager. “Congo is the second-largest market for energy access in the world after Nigeria,” he said in an interview.
In Congo, about 80 million of the country’s more than 100 million people have no access to electricity, compared with 86 million in Nigeria. With an area roughly the size of Western Europe and a poorly developed grid, many Congolese remain far from the nearest power connections.
“The electrification rate for Congo is about 20%, so it’s one of the lowest on the continent. And I believe that in rural areas it’s only 2%,” said Aron, whose company has offices in Kenya and Nigeria. “The central grid is quite limited in its reach.”
So far, the fund has received $65 million from the World Bank and a further $7 million from the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. It seeks to support projects such as solar mini-grids for small communities and providers of solar home systems.
GreenMax, which manages six funds across Africa, plans to offer guarantees to encourage domestic banks to lend to projects. It has spoken to the local units of Kenya’s Equity Group Holdings Plc and Togo-based Ecobank Transnational Inc., Aron said. Equity Group declined to comment and Ecobank said it wasn’t immediately able to.
The first applications for funding are being sought this month and will be assessed in coming months, he said. Funding will depend on the results of the projects in terms of increasing electricity access.
For now, the fund can only accept donor grants to build its capital, though it’s exploring the option of taking on low-cost concessional loans, Aron said.
It’s a vehicle “where all the donors can channel their money to the country,” Lyza Shodu, country delivery lead for GEAPP in Congo, said in an interview.
In addition to traditional funding partners in Europe, GreenMax will also target Asian nations and the Middle East, with initial talks already held with the Saudi Arabian government, Aron said.
Interest in decentralized renewable energy has surged across Africa, prompting the creation of several new funds to invest in the sector.
The World Bank’s Distributed Access Through Renewable Energy Scale-up Program in Nigeria is the biggest, at $750 million. A separate Nigerian facility backed by a United Nations agency and the country’s sovereign wealth fund is targeting $500 million. That vehicle will be managed by Africa50, a pan-African infrastructure fund manager that’s also setting up a $200 million facility to invest across the continent.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
