The UK’s development finance institution and impact investor, British International Investment (BII) along with the UK-registered charity, Shell Foundation recently announced investments of US$2.1mn and US$0.5mn respectively into SunCulture, a Kenya-based company that provides solar-powered irrigation systems to smallholder farmers
According to the World Food Programme, food insecurity affects about 2.8 million people in Kenya. This is further exacerbated by the impacts of climate change which is reducing productivity in the agriculture sector. BII and Shell Foundation have partnered to design and finance the facility to enable SunCulture to harness the future value of carbon credits and lower the upfront cost of climate smart irrigation products. The investment will help 9,000 more smallholder farmers in Kenya to increase farmland productivity in a sustainable way and contribute to the region’s goal of enhancing food security.
Carbon monetisation helps SunCulture reduce the cost of solar irrigation pumps by 25-40%, thus enabling them to materialially increase their addressable market. This helps in putting clean irrigation solutions in the hands of more than thousand East African farmers.
The strategic MoU between BII and Shell Foundation endeavours to provide up to US$245mn blended finance and co-investment products to remove the barriers associated with accessing finance for early to mid-stage businesses within the agri-energy and other decentralised renewable energy and related sectors. Their investment in SunCulture supports the development of sustainable and resilient industries and also aligns with the vision of the new Africa Green Industrialisation Initiative (AGII) launched at COP28, all while contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For more information, visit: www.bii.co.uk; https://shellfoundation.org/ and https://sunculture.io/
