SunFi aims to be the fastest way for Nigerians to find, finance and manage solar

SunFi, the Nigerian clean tech startup that connects people and businesses who want solar energy access to payment plans that match their needs, has raised $2.325 million in seed funding.

The self-described energy financial tech platform received backing from lead investors Nairobi-based Factor[e] and SCM Capital Asset Management and participating investors such as Voltron Capital, Norrsken Impact Accelerator, Ventures Platform and Sovereign Capital.

On a call with TechCrunch, CEO Rotimi Thomas said the investment will help SunFi grow its operations and improve its capabilities to recommend the best systems at the lowest cost to customers.

SunFi isn’t Thomas’ first rodeo at the helm of an energy startup. In 2018, he co-founded Aspire, a solar installation company based on the knowledge he acquired in college on renewable energy and working in several roles relating to energy, gas and power projects across Nigeria and other African countries, including a five-year stint at Siemens as head of market development. Though this business morphed into SunFi three years later, launching Aspire was the first of a lifelong journey that Thomas had envisioned in trying to fix the electricity issues individuals and businesses face in Nigeria, he said on the call.

Nigerian households and businesses have little or no access to affordable and reliable solar technology, which reduces their reliance on grid-based power that suffers from insufficient generation capacity and fails to serve most of Nigeria’s 200 million people who live in rural areas. Turning to off-grid solutions that use solar energy is an option for these people who need electricity for simple necessities like lighting, heating and communication. And that’s what Rotimi’s previous upstart did. Aspire ran a power-as-a-service business model that helped install more than 500 solar systems for individuals and businesses. But despite being marketed as a cheap option, rural electrification in the form of microgrids and solar systems can be expensive to these sub-consumers because of their low spending power.

“Customers would always ask us if there was a way for them to pay for the solar systems in installments,” Thomas said. “Because of that, we went to the banks and tried to work with them to finance this kind of payment, but we realized that banks also had a problem: they couldn’t dash out credit to customers to finance retail solar systems when they didn’t understand the technical risks involved in owning them.”

Further market research revealed that other solar providers faced the same issue of customers requesting to pay in installments. Thomas and his co-founders — COO Tomiwa Igun and CTO Olaoluwa Faniyi — decided to provide credit and began leasing these systems in what later became SunFi. They believed that as an outfit, they could manage the technical risk involved with solar systems and that it was highly likely that customers would pay because they valued solar systems and saw them as critical pieces of power infrastructure.

Think about it. Retail solar systems are marketed via word of mouth, but with distribution being fragmented and minimal avenues to provide financing, platforms like SunFi that act as aggregators become appealing to customers.

“The challenge customers face with solar providers is that they want solutions they can pay small for; however, these solar platforms can’t offer. Because banks are afraid of the technical risk involved, they need something in between to talk with good solar providers and do the installation work while providing good capital to customers looking for the right solution. We’re the guys in the middle of all this,” Thomas said.

SunFi creates value for these clean energy investors by de-risking the technical and credit risk involved in financing portfolios of solar solutions, opening avenues for lending as a service play for clean energy providers. Since its official launch last February, SunFi has onboarded over 40 solar system vendors to its platform at various stages of vetting; 10 are its core providers, which have served more than 129 customers. Within the past year, the one-year-old energy startup has deployed more than $600,000 to these customers via its partnerships with financial institutions.

The Nigeria-based energy company provides customers with two payment methods: a lease to own, where after an initial deposit, customers make payments in installments before owing the solar system, and a subscription model, where customers pay to use the solar system monthly. SunFi’s revenues are from the margin on the lease-to-own model and subscription fees from the latter. The company said it is working on a third revenue stream where it will assist solar providers with inventory financing.

Some startups already finance solar systems with one or multiple entities, such as Carbon. But Thomas doesn’t regard them as competitors; the same goes for solar system providers. Instead, most of these platforms are partners since they already fill a need in the market and SunFi’s job aggregates them. “Because we have a unique experience having been a solar provider initially and seeing the frustration and challenges of installations in Nigeria, we’ve taken all that technical and credit knowledge to build a system that hopefully works for customers, solar providers and banks,” said the chief executive.

“SunFi also has a portal for the solar provider to log in, track and manage their business of building several types of products to market to customers and get access to financing. Investors have their dashboard to manage their portal to track how their money is spent in terms of being deployed to manage portfolios or retail customers. So we’re built as a fintech for the clean tech space, which doesn’t exist in Nigeria.”

The SunFi team. Image Credits: SunFi

The clean tech with fintech features will be looking to enhance its platform over the next 12-18 months with this financing. It also intends to convert more than 4,000 customers within that same time frame as the 29-person team continues to grow. The clean tech is in talks to raise additional third-party capital, most likely debt, from commercial banks and other financing partners to channel that money through the system and finance all the energy platform’s demands to take care of this year.

“SunFi has the ability to transform the way clean energy is accessed by households and businesses across Nigeria by creating a marketplace of clean energy products combined with flexible payment options — all of which are personalized to the customer’s financial and energy needs,” said Lyndsay Holley-Handler, partner and chief venture builder at Factor[e] on the investment. “Platforms like these have unlocked access to clean energy in other markets but don’t yet exist in Africa. This type of innovation and disruption is why we decided to be part of SunFi’s journey…”

Why Do Mass Expulsions Still Happen?

By: Meghan Garrity

Guest post by Meghan Garrity

January 30, 2023 marks 100 years since the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.

This population exchange was not the first such agreement, but it was the first compulsory exchange. Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion and Muslim Greek nationals did not have the option to remain. Further, Greek and Muslim refugees who had fled the Ottoman Empire and Greece, respectively, were not allowed to return to their homes. Only small populations in Istanbul and Western Thrace were exempted from the treaty.

The population exchange between Greece and Turkey is an example of the broader phenomenon of mass expulsion—a government policy to systematically remove an ethnic group without individual legal review and with no recognition of the right to return. Far from an isolated incident, the Lausanne Convention was one of 19 population “transfers” or “exchanges” throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. These expulsions occurred with the stroke of a pen, but mass expulsions also occur at the point of a sword. Governments use violence to force out “undesirable” groups by destroying their homes, appropriating their assets and income, and in some cases, killing members of the group to encourage others to flee.

Although mass expulsion is rare, it is recurring. Between 1900–2020, governments expelled over 30 million citizens and non-citizens in 139 different episodes around the world.

Far from a historical phenomenon, over the last 50 years governments have continued to implement expulsion policies at an average rate of 1.56 per year. In just the last two decades (from 2000–2020) there were 24 expulsion events, including Eritreans from Ethiopia (1998–99); Rohingya from Myanmar (2012–13; 2016–18); and Afghans from Pakistan (2016).

What explains this recurrence? In the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly after World War I, minority groups were seen as dangerous Trojan horses that sowed instability and brought insecurity. The “Great Powers” and international institutions like the League of Nations, promoted expulsion as a necessary policy to “unmix” antagonistic populations. It was believed that only by reuniting groups with their co-ethnics and establishing homogenous nation-states—however fanciful that idea was in practice—could international peace and security be achieved.

Therefore, in post-conflict environments mass expulsion was often considered a viable policy, typically disguised in the more benign-sounding language of population “transfer” or “exchange.” The 1923 Lausanne Convention was part of one such post-conflict peace agreement that ended the war between Greece and Turkey and redrew the borders of the soon-to-be Turkish Republic.

Notable figures such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Herbert Hoover openly promoted and lobbied for mass expulsion. In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Czechoslovakia President-in-exile Edvard Beneš wrote in Foreign Affairs, “It will be necessary after this war to carry out a transfer of populations on a very much larger scale than after the last war. This must be done in as humane a manner as possible, internationally organized and internationally financed.” After the war, the Allied Powers carried out Beneš’ wish. The 1945 Potsdam Agreement authorized the “orderly and humane” expulsion of between nine and 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

But international norms and law slowly began to shift. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights included the right of nationals to return to their country of origin. The next year the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibited “individual or mass forcible transfers.” Protection for refugees soon followed with the 1951 Refugee Convention explicitly stating, “No contracting state shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee.” Subsequent regional human rights treaties bolstered legal frameworks against the expulsion of both nationals and non-nationals, including the European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol 4 (1963), American Convention on Human Rights (1969), African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981), and more recently the Arab Charter on Human Rights (2004). In 1998 the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court included “deportation or forcible transfer of populations” as Crimes Against Humanity.

Yet despite these legal advancements, mass expulsion persists. Although laws against expulsion are in place, there is minimal, if any, regional or international enforcement. In the face of myriad atrocities and human rights abuses, cases of mass expulsion are not prioritized. The limited international justice resources are dedicated to accountability for more heinous atrocities like genocide. Unfortunately, multiple rounds of mass expulsion may eventually escalate to more serious violence as in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar: expelled in 1978, 1991–92, 2012–13, and 2016–18. Only this latest episode has been referred to the International Court of Justice amidst accusations of genocide.

Governments also hesitate to call out others for implementing expulsion policies because they too have expelled. In 1983 Nigeria expelled over two million West African migrants without any serious criticism from its regional neighbors. Affected countries like Ghana, Niger, and Chad had previously expelled populations from their territories, and thus refrained from condemning Nigeria.

Furthermore, while mass expulsion has continued over time, the nature of the person targeted has changed. In the first half of the twentieth century, mass expulsions almost exclusively targeted citizens. Since 1950, only 12 incidents of citizen-only expulsions have occurred, which at first glance seems to indicate the customary international law against expelling citizens has diffused around the world. But, on the contrary, expelling states have simply modified their strategy by removing citizens simultaneously with non-citizens—foreign nationals, resident aliens, and/or refugees. When non-citizens are the main target of expulsion, these decisions are often considered “immigration policies” under the sovereign jurisdiction of the state. However, international law also guarantees the protection of non-nationals from mass expulsion and requires certain rules to be followed, including non-discrimination and individual legal review. The en masse removal of groups based on identity characteristics is illegal.

Mass expulsion, in whatever form it takes, has gross humanitarian consequences for those affected. In the chaos families are separated, homes and livelihoods are left behind, and in some cases, lives are lost. Importantly, research shows these policies do not bring the positive outcomes their advocates proclaim, and expelling states often suffer economically and politically in their aftermath.

The anniversary of the 1923 Lausanne Convention is a moment to reflect on the tragedy of the Greek-Turkish “population exchange.” More policy attention is needed to prevent and punish mass expulsion.

Meghan Garrity is a postdoctoral fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

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SunFi aims to be the fastest way for Nigerians to find, finance and manage solar

Why Do Mass Expulsions Still Happen?