How SunCulture's $10M securitisation deal with Mirova is turning future farmer repayments into immediate capital for new solar pumps
Kenyan climate-tech company SunCulture has secured $10 million in financing to expand access to solar-powered irrigation for farmers, using a securitisation structure designed to free up capital tied to existing customer repayments.
The facility, provided by Mirova’s Gigaton Fund, will allow SunCulture Kenya to transfer eligible customer receivables to a dedicated financing vehicle and use the released capital to finance more solar irrigation systems.
Financial technology company Kaleidofin supported the transaction, which was announced on September 24, 2026. The financing comes as solar irrigation businesses across Africa face a familiar challenge: demand for productive-use energy technologies may exist, but providers need substantial working capital to finance customers who repay equipment over time.
SunCulture operates a pay-as-you-go model in which farmers can acquire solar irrigation systems and spread payments over an agreed period. While the approach reduces the upfront cost for customers, it leaves part of the company’s capital locked in future repayments.
The new financing structure is intended to shorten that cycle.
Under the arrangement, a special purpose vehicle backed by senior secured financing from the Gigaton Fund will acquire eligible receivables generated by SunCulture Kenya. Instead of waiting for farmers to complete their repayment schedules before recovering the capital deployed into equipment, SunCulture can access financing against those future cash flows and direct the money towards new installations.
For farmers, the immediate significance is greater availability of financing for solar irrigation. For SunCulture, the transaction is designed to increase the number of customers it can serve without relying entirely on new equity or conventional corporate borrowing to fund each additional system.
SunCulture co-founder and CEO Samir Ibrahim said access to financing, rather than farmer demand alone, has been a major constraint on expanding irrigation in Kenya. He said the new facility gives the company longer-term, foreign-exchange-protected capital and allows financing to be recycled more quickly into additional farmers.
The financing comes against a sizeable unmet market for solar-powered water pumping. The 2024 Off-Grid Solar Market Trends Report by the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program and GOGLA estimated the global addressable market for solar water pumps at about 30.9 million units, based on farming households without electricity and water-resource constraints.
Only about 23,000 solar water pumps were sold globally in 2023, according to the report. Based on prevailing market trends, sales were projected to reach about 354,000 units between 2024 and 2030. Meeting the broader universal-access opportunity would require an estimated $16 billion in financing.
Affordability remains one of the biggest barriers to reaching that market.
Earlier GOGLA analysis estimated that approximately 5.2 million smallholder farmers in rural, off-grid areas of sub-Saharan Africa could potentially use solar water pumps. However, once affordability constraints were considered, the addressable market fell to around 640,000 farmers, representing an estimated value of $684 million at the time.
The figures highlight why financing has become an increasingly important part of the solar irrigation conversation. Even when the technology can reduce farmers’ operating costs and improve access to water, the initial purchase price can put the equipment beyond the reach of many smallholders.
Financing providers also face their own challenge. Companies selling equipment through instalment or pay-as-you-go models have to carry the cost of those systems while waiting for customers to make payments over months or years.
Receivables financing offers one way of addressing that mismatch by allowing businesses to raise capital against expected future payments.
In SunCulture’s case, the approach is being applied to productive-use energy assets, linking climate finance directly to agricultural production. Mirova has positioned the transaction as a way of bringing institutional capital into climate-smart agriculture while developing financing structures that could potentially be applied to other distributed productive-use energy assets.
Kaleidofin supported the transaction through activities including portfolio monitoring, receivables selection and cash-flow modelling.
The financing comes at a time when Kenya is looking for ways to strengthen agricultural productivity while reducing farmers’ exposure to increasingly unpredictable rainfall. Irrigation remains limited across much of the country’s agricultural sector, leaving many farmers dependent on weather patterns to determine when and how often they can grow crops.
Solar-powered irrigation can provide an alternative by giving farmers greater control over water availability without exposing them to the recurring fuel costs associated with diesel-powered pumps.
The potential economic impact goes beyond access to electricity. Reliable irrigation can allow farmers to grow crops outside traditional rainfall periods, increase production cycles, expand cultivated land and move into higher-value crops.
GOGLA research involving nearly 1,200 solar water pump customers across East and Southern Africa found that 90% of respondents reported higher incomes after adopting the technology. Of those, 47% reported a significant increase while 43% reported a slight increase. Respondents linked the improvements to higher production, reduced farming costs and expanded cultivation.
For Kenya’s farmers, however, those potential benefits depend partly on whether financing can reach them at terms they can afford.
The same financing challenge affects companies on the supply side. A provider that must wait years to recover the cost of equipment sold through instalments needs enough working capital to continue expanding its customer base.
The SunCulture deal seeks to bridge that gap by separating the farmer repayment period from the company’s ability to redeploy capital.
That model could become increasingly relevant as African climate-tech companies move beyond household energy access into productive technologies such as irrigation, refrigeration, agricultural processing and other equipment designed to generate income.
There are still risks to scaling such financing structures. Agricultural incomes can fluctuate with harvests and weather conditions, while currency movements, inflation and changing purchasing power can affect repayment performance. GOGLA has previously highlighted these pressures as challenges for off-grid solar companies operating in African markets.
The $10 million facility therefore represents more than an expansion of SunCulture’s financing capacity. It is also a test of whether institutional capital can be structured around thousands of smaller productive assets and recycled efficiently as those assets generate repayments.
For SunCulture, the immediate goal is straightforward: turn capital tied up in existing customer receivables into financing for more solar irrigation systems.
For the wider market, the bigger question is whether similar structures can make it easier for African climate-tech companies to finance farmers and small businesses at scale without pushing the cost of clean technologies beyond the customers they are intended to serve.
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