Solaris Offgrid Recognised as Winner of the UNDP CAP Financial Innovation Challenge

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Solaris Offgrid has been recognised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as one of the seven winners of the Climate Aggregation Platform (CAP) Financial Innovation Challenge, a distinction that ratifies the contributions of our receivables finance platform, as a financial aggregation solution with great potential to increase access to low-cost financing for small-scale, low-carbon energy assets in developing countries.

The award arrives at the right time for our organisation and drives forward our efforts in the inclusive finance sphere, given we recently unveiled the innovative Bridgin platform, through which investors can easily access and purchase pools of receivables from last-mile distributors who, in return, get instant liquidity to scale their operations, and the backbone of our commitments to resolve the bottleneck in last-mile financing and scale the Paygo business model.

Our next step, as announced during our latest webinar, is to build a multi-country, multi-distributor platform that can generate opportunities for funding in the Paygo industry without barriers of any kind and unlock further access to life-changing products and services for underbanked communities. With the support from UNDP through CAP, we’re now headed to deploy our receivables financing solution in Uganda, looking forward to replicating the outstanding results seen with our pilot in Kenya, to build upon our legal and back-up servicing framework, as well as further develop the technology, in parallel with mobile money operators, to automate payment flow segregation to function with as many distributors, in as many countries, as possible.

To fully understand our solution, we invite you to check out our profile on the UNDP’s website.

The UNDP CAP Financial Innovation Challenge, launched in 2022 with funding from the Global Environment Facility, supports the development of seven solutions at the design stage, so that novel financial aggregation structures and models can be developed and lead to financially closed transactions in East Africa in the near future, with the goal to increase access to and lower the cost of financing for the clean energy sector, in different sub-sectors, from off-grid and on-grid solar, mini grids, productive use appliances, and e-mobility, clean cooking, etc. And, in doing so, help close the investment gap to achieve universal energy access.

We'd like to extend our congratulations to the other six winning organisations:

Nithio, Mirova Sunfunder, Incharge Energy, Hypoport Africa, 4R Digital

Read UNDP’s official news announcement here.

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About Solaris Offgrid

Solaris Offgrid supports distributors and manufacturers across all industries in over 35 countries through SolarisLab Product Design Services and flexible IT solutions. Solaris Offgrid’s flagship PaygOps platform is an interoperable B2B SaaS which connects energy and utility appliances (solar devices, water-pumps, cookstoves, smart metres, e-bikes) and payment methods (Pay-as-you-go and Mobile Money) within a suite of enterprise applications or API services, to allow distributors to smoothly manage their operations and tackle their challenges at the last mile, thus enabling them to provide affordable essential products and services to millions of people at the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid.