Nigeria’s REA signs grants with eight renewable energy companies

ABUJA, April 30, 2025 – Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency (REA) has signed the first grant agreements under the Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-Up (DARES) project with eight renewable energy companies to expand energy access to 17.5 million Nigerians, the agency announced at a signing ceremony on Monday.

Funded by the World Bank, the USD-750 million DARES project is a key part of the Nigeria Electrification Programme and supports mini-grid and standalone solar-system rollouts to unserved and underserved communities.

Under the performance-based grant component for isolated mini-grids, PriVida Power secured funding to install 2.47 MW of solar capacity across eleven communities in Kogi State, delivering over 11,000 new electricity connections.

The standalone solar systems component saw agreements signed with Baobab Plus, Salpha Energy, Asolar, NTA-StarTimes, A4&T, Sun King, Bboxx and D.Light to deploy tier 1 and 2 plug-and-play solar systems for households and MSMEs in rural areas.

“Today marks a significant day. We are signing this grant agreement with one of our RESCOs [renewable energy service companies], PriVida Energy, which is committed to adding a total of 2.5 MW of reliable, clean electricity that will give us an additional 11,000 connections. For the solar home systems, we aim to deploy 1.6 million standalone solar home systems – a higher figure than the total solar home systems we deployed under the Nigerian Electrification Project,” REA managing director Abba Aliyu said.

The DARES project also contributes to Mission 300, a global initiative aiming to deliver energy access to 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030.

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