Electrified & Exposed Ep.1: Why Currency Risk Matters for Sub-Saharan Africa's Off-Grid Energy Future

Currency risk (often referred to as FX risk) is one of the most under appreciated barriers to sub-Saharan Africa's energy transition. In many contexts it is not just a financing headache. It shapes which projects get built, which companies survive, and which communities remain without power.

The Energy Talk partnered with Dr. Churchill Agutu from the Collegium Helveticum to explore this issue through the voices of the practitioners navigating it every day — developers, advisers, investors, and institutions working at the heart of the challenge. 

We are doing a 2 episode mini-series on the topic. In Episode 1, we zoom into the off-grid electricity sector.

We speak with Daniel Komolafe, CEO and Founder of First Electric, Nigeria, and Bodunde Akinola at CrossBoundary.

Daniel takes us back to First Electric's early days deploying mesh grids in rural Nigeria. He describes how the Naira moved from 300 to the dollar to 1,500 to the dollar, a fivefold depreciation, pushing his company to the verge of insolvency on a $50,000 blended debt facility. As he puts it: if they had taken a more significant loan, the company would have been totally bankrupt. It is a story many energy entrepreneurs across the continent will recognise.

Bodunde brings a different lens. Drawing on his experience advising companies across frontier markets, he walks through the core solutions:  hedging, tariff indexing, blended financing, and local currency financing, and is candid about where the real difficulty lies: scaling local currency financing remains the hard problem that the sector has not yet solved.

Learn more about:⁠

• Publication on financing costs for off-grid electrification in sub-Saharan Africa⁠
• Collegium Helveticum
• First Electric 
• CrossBoundary Advisory 

Connect on LinkedIn with:

• Churchill Agutu 
• Bounde Akinola
• Daniel Komolafe