d.light, an early pioneer in off-grid solar solutions targeting low-income households has announced it has closed $125 million in funding through a securitization facility to meet the growing demand for off-grid solar products in Tanzania.
Founded in 2007 at Stanford, California and based in Nairobi and Palo Alto, California, d.light offers a range of off-grid solar products to low-income families. The range of household products includes solar-powered lanterns, cookstoves, solar home systems, TVs, radios, and smartphones.
In addition to its off-grid solar products, d.light also offers consumer finance. The company has announced the new funding will help scale up its low-cost PayGo personal finance business as it increases its existing securitized financing facility in Tanzania. This raises the total funding d.light has received in securitized finance to $490 million since 2020.
d.light’s finance facility in Tanzania works by leveraging the payments of d.light’s existing and future customers there for solar products purchased using its Pay-Go service to raise funding to upscale the company’s activities and grow market share in the country. The financing facility in Tanzania will be anchored by the Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank Group (TDB Group).
d.light and its lending partner African Frontier Capital (AFC) are using the incoming capital as the basis for a new financing vehicle, Brighter Life Tanzania 1 Limited (BLT1).
The company had earlier announced it had reached the 150 million customers milestone in May with over 30 million products sold.
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d.light CEO Nick Imudia said, “This new financing from TDB gives us the extra funding to reach more low-income families and households in Tanzania via our Pay-Go business, in a way that is affordable for our customers and sustainable for our business.”
He further added, “d.light and our lending partners are long-time pioneers in developing securitized finance as an innovative, scalable financing model for raising equity for off-grid solar that is guaranteed against current and future customer sales. We’ve successfully used the securitization model for several years in Kenya and now we and our partners are expanding it to Tanzania.”
Michael Awori, CEO of TDB, said, “Access to energy is critical to the sustainable development of the continent, especially for the most vulnerable off-grid communities. As one of the leading renewable energy financiers in the region, we are delighted to extend this second facility to d.light, this time in Tanzania.”
Eric De Moudt, AFC’s founder and CEO, commented, “We are very happy to announce the launch of our latest social impact securitization, BLT1, which further expands our industry-leading off-balance sheet securitization structures into new jurisdictions for d.light and brings the total volume of local currency receivables being financed to almost USD500M.
