7 August 2025, London: A ground-breaking finance facility making it simpler and easier for people and businesses in Africa to buy clean solar generators in place of polluting fossil fuel generators, will dramatically scale up following €6m in grant funding from ZE-Gen, a collaborative initiative by the Carbon Trust and Innovate UK.
Green Genset Facility (GGF), a not-for-profit organisation empowering small and medium-sized distributors supplying solar generators to the off-grid or weak-grid retail market, will use the grant funding to expand its work providing access to high quality stock at scale through affordable financing.
Unlike conventional finance, GGF finance is fast and simple, and its iterative approach allows distributors to only buy the stock they are confident they can sell, avoiding costly stockpiling, minimising risk and enabling sustainable growth.
ZE-Gen’s collaboration will allow GGF to ramp up its work breaking down the traditional barriers to financing solar inventory that many small and medium wholesalers face, such as low-ticket sizes, complex due diligence and high transaction costs.
The new funding is part of ZE-Gen’s mission to improve lives by making renewable energy the affordable go-to source of power in countries where reliable electricity is limited or non-existent and comes following £10m in support for ZE-Gen’s work from the IKEA Foundation earlier this year.
Despite being home to two-thirds of the world’s population, emerging economies currently only account for 15% of global clean energy investment, with homes and businesses facing frequent blackouts that can last for weeks at a time, negatively impacting daily lives, health and business income.
ZE-Gen’s unique approach tackles market barriers to renewable energy-based alternatives to fossil fuel generators by uniting innovation, finance and skills to drive competitive market growth. Launched at COP27, ZE-Gen’s ambition is to mobilise £100m of funding to inspire action and implement real-world change. To date ZE-Gen has catalysed £39.75m and supported more than 30 projects across Nigeria, the Philippines, Cote d’Ivoire, Fiji, South Africa, Malawi and Uganda.
ZE-Gen Lead at the Carbon Trust, Lily Beadle said:
“Globally, around 1.5 billion people don’t have access to reliable electricity and the potential market for renewable energy generators across sub-Saharan Africa is huge. The success and failure of any business hinges on being able to access affordable working capital and so ZE-Gen’s involvement with GGF will make a huge difference to the growth of the solar generator market and create new green jobs.”
Maxime Marion, Managing Director of GGF said:
“The €6m in grant funding support from ZE-Gen, backed by IKEA Foundation, enables GGF to power-charge the solar generator market in Sub-Saharan Africa. For too long small and medium distributors have been priced out of the market by onerous, inaccessible and complex finance facilities, limiting customer choice and restricting competitive market growth and the GGF funding marks a step change in the market.”
ZE-Gen’s grant funding for GGF is made possible following support for ZE-Gen from IKEA Foundation.
Richa Goyal, Programme Manager, IKEA Foundation said:
“IKEA Foundation is committed to helping people build sustainable livelihoods in a climate positive way. By supporting ZE-Gen and its collaboration with GGF we are empowering people and businesses to improve both lives and economies.”
How GGF works:
- Solar distributors applying for GGF financing are selected based on GGF’s fast-tracked due diligence
- After approval, distributors can order high quality solar products from any wholesale suppliers of their choice
- Distributors repay the inventory to GGF with payment terms up to 24 months
- GGF’s digital monitoring tracks distributors performance which, if positive, unlocks follow-up tranches of financing
This results-based approach allows distributors to build sustainable businesses by growing at their own pace, while reducing investors’ risk.
Notes to Editors
For more information please contact: ze-gen@carbontrust.com
Background Information: ZE-Gen
Launched at COP27, ZE-Gen, is the leading international initiative working to improve the lives of people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Indo-Pacific region by driving the use of renewable energy in place of polluting fossil fuel generators.
ZE-Gen is a collaborative initiative by the Carbon Trust and Innovate UK and has an ambition to mobilise £100m of funding to inspire action and implement real-world change, delivered in partnership with sector specialists.
The Carbon Trust leads on ZE-Gen’s policy, research, outreach and strategy, with input and oversight across the whole ZE-Gen initiative. This includes bringing partners together and engaging with the public and private sector to identify new opportunities and providing commercialisation support such as investment readiness, market engagement, strategy & sales and product/service development.
Innovate UK is responsible for delivering grant funding to advance renewable technology through the ZE-Gen Innovation Fund.
To date, ZE-Gen has catalysed £39.75m as part of it work to create jobs, power businesses and tackle climate change by ending the use of fossil fuel generators. with support from the IKEA Foundation and the UK Government’s Ayrton Fund. It has supported more than 35 localised renewable energy projects across Nigeria, the Philippines, Cote d’Ivoire, Fiji, South Africa, Malawi and Uganda.
Globally, around 1.5 billion people don’t have access to reliable electricity. It is estimated that 25 million, highly polluting, fossil fuel generators are in use across emerging economies, resulting in huge financial, social and environmental costs.[1] Associated health risks include premature death, lung cancer, hearing impairment and numerous other problems.
High carbon emissions can also hold back countries’ efforts to meet their climate goals, and the high running costs of fossil fuel generators can reduce finance available for business, healthcare and education.
Despite being home to two-thirds of the world’s population, emerging economies account for only 15% of global clean energy investment, with homes and businesses facing frequent blackouts that can last for weeks at a time, negatively impacting daily lives and business income.
About IKEA Foundation
The IKEA Foundation is a strategic philanthropy that focuses its grant making efforts on tackling the two biggest threats to children’s futures: poverty and climate change. It currently grants more than €200 million per year to help improve family incomes and quality of life while protecting the planet from climate change. Since 2009, the IKEA Foundation has granted more than €2 billion to create a better future for children and their families. In 2021 the Board of the IKEA Foundation decided to make an additional €1 billion available over the next five years to accelerate the reduction of Greenhouse Gas emissions. Learn more at: www.ikeafoundation.org
About the Ayrton Fund
The UK Government announced the Ayrton Fund commitment of up to £1bn for clean energy innovation at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. It is part of the total £11.6bn of UK International Climate Finance also announced over the period from 2021 to 2026. The vision of the Ayrton Fund is to help drive forward the clean energy transition in developing countries, by creating and demonstrating new technologies and business models to deploy them. It will demonstrate UK leadership and expertise in cutting global emissions through world-leading innovations. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) jointly manage the Ayrton Fund.
[1] 20190919-summary-the-dirty-footprint-of-the-broken-grid.pdf