Prado Power has secured a senior debt facility from REPP 2, a private debt fund managed by London-based climate and impact investor Camco, to build and operate five solar mini-grids with battery storage across Benue and Nasarawa states. Announced September 30, the deal was structured through a special purpose vehicle, with the loan amount undisclosed. Together, the five projects will deliver 1.84 megawatt-peak of solar capacity and 5.2 megawatt-hours of battery storage, aiming to connect more than 12,000 households and micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, many of them for the first time in their lives.
The construction itself is being supported alongside the World Bank Group’s DARES performance-based subsidy programme, facilitated through Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency. That pairing of public performance-based grants with private debt reflects a genuinely practical financing gap in Nigerian mini-grid development. Grants reward developers for connections actually delivered, but they rarely cover the full upfront capital needed to build a project before those connections exist, which is exactly the gap senior debt like this REPP 2 facility is designed to bridge. Beyond expanding electricity access, the mini-grids are expected to displace diesel generation in the off-grid communities they serve, avoiding more than 1,100 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
Prado Power CEO Washima Mede framed the deal as proof of how clean energy can be deployed alongside productive-use infrastructure, delivering wider social and economic benefits to underserved communities rather than electricity access alone. That framing isn’t abstract for Prado Power specifically. The company has an established partnership with Farm Warehouse combining mini-grid power with agricultural services, equipment, microcredit and insurance, including a pilot in Benue State built specifically to give women access to productive-use equipment. An earlier version of that same model, an agro-processing hub equipped with crop machinery and a community freezer, already runs in Akwa Ibom State’s Mbiabet communities, giving residents a tangible local business to run on top of newly reliable power rather than leaving electrification as an end in itself.
This REPP 2 facility also isn’t Prado Power’s first or only financing innovation, and that broader track record is worth knowing. The company has been building out Benue State in serial portfolios since 2023, starting with a single mini-grid and agri-hub, expanding to a four-site Benue State Portfolio II in 2024 that raised 4.4 million euros and connected roughly 12,300 customers, then launching a considerably larger twelve-site Portfolio III in 2025 targeting around 23,500 households and small businesses, with two further portfolios, IV and V, progressing alongside it. Separately, Prado Power structured Nigeria’s first certified blended local-currency green infrastructure sukuk for a solar mini-grid project, a 3.9 billion naira, seven-year instrument guaranteed by InfraCredit and backed by subordinated first-loss capital from the UK-funded Climate Finance Blending Facility, which crowded in twelve domestic institutional investors behind a senior tranche they otherwise wouldn’t have touched. Read against that history, this latest REPP 2 facility looks less like a single funding event and more like the next entry in a deliberate, multi-instrument financing strategy Prado Power has been refining for several years.
Camco’s own involvement fits a similar pattern of deliberate positioning rather than opportunistic lending. Investment manager Alfred Kudjordji described the financing as demonstrating Camco’s commitment to the businesses building Africa’s decentralised energy future, specifically highlighting the combination of clean energy access with productive agricultural use as exactly the integrated, climate-positive impact REPP 2 was designed to support. REPP 2 itself is a blended finance fund backed by the Green Climate Fund, Norfund, FMO Investment Management, Belgium’s BIO, Ceniarth and Austria’s OeEB, investing specifically in distributed renewable energy projects across Sub-Saharan Africa, with a broader fund target of supporting roughly 330 megawatts of new small-scale renewable capacity across solar, hydroelectric and wind projects.
For a sector where the hardest problem is rarely generating interest in rural electrification and almost always securing capital that actually survives the gap between construction costs and performance-based grant disbursement, Prado Power’s willingness to keep layering new financing instruments, equity, performance grants, a pioneering local-currency sukuk and now blended debt, on top of an already-proven productive-use model is a more instructive case study than the headline connection numbers alone. Nigeria has been described as something of a proving ground for mini-grid development across the continent, and deals structured this deliberately are a meaningful part of why that reputation has started to stick.
