Nigeria has the world’s largest electricity deficit, with almost half of its over 220 million population lacking access to electricity from the national grid. The massive shortfall in electricity supply has led to a heavy reliance on expensive, environmentally polluting fossil-fuel-powered solutions. Solar energy is a promising alternative, but is held back by high upfront costs.
The pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model is effective in alleviating the upfront costs of solar energy in Nigeria, but it’s not working as well as it could, constrained as it is by the regulatory inflexibility of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the inadequate enforcement of quality standards by the Standards Organisation of Nigeria and the erosion of customer trust. Greater regulatory flexibility will be needed to address this bottleneck.
