Companies shaping Africa’s climate and energy transition

The unit economics case for electric motorcycles in African cities is not speculative. Motorcycle taxi operators across East and West Africa typically earn between $10 and $15 per day. Petrol costs absorb 40 to 60% of that income. Spiro’s battery-as-a-service model aims to reduce daily fuel cost to under $2, leaving riders materially better off from the point of adoption. The KES 290 (approximately $2.24) swap cost in Kenya is the price point that makes that arithmetic work.

Kenya illustrates how the model can scale under supportive market conditions. Electric motorcycles accounted for 0.5% of new registrations in 2021. By 2025 that figure had reached 15.3%. Of the 25,277 electric motorcycles sold in Kenya in 2025, Spiro reports more than 15,000 were its own. Spiro now reports over 400 swap stations in Kenya and 500 active sites in Rwanda. These are company-reported figures; independent verification is not available at the time of publication.

The battery-swapping infrastructure model carries one structural advantage in African cities specifically: grid unreliability is not a barrier to operation. A rider whose area lost power overnight can still exchange a charged battery at a station with backup supply or solar. That feature makes the network more resilient to the power infrastructure conditions that complicate standard EV charging deployment.

The June 2026 NewTrails Capital investment and planned Nairobi R&D centre signal a manufacturing localisation strategy. Spiro acquired UK engineering firm Coexlion and intends to design motorcycles for African road conditions rather than adapting Chinese-designed knockdown kits. This is the early industrialisation argument that worked for automotive sectors in other markets. Whether it delivers cost advantages or absorbs capital without equivalent return is the open test.

According to FAO and Nigerian agriculture estimates, Nigeria loses 40 to 45% of fresh produce to post-harvest spoilage annually. The country harvests an estimated 3.9 million tonnes of tomatoes each year and loses a significant share before reaching buyers. The causes are compound: unreliable power at the farm gate, limited cold storage within viable transport distance of smallholder plots, and fragmented logistics chains without the speed infrastructure perishables require.

KAMIM Technologies seeks to address that compound failure through solar-powered cold chain infrastructure deployed at the farm gate. It targets an estimated 60 million smallholder farmers in Nigeria, a figure cited widely in agricultural literature though definitions of smallholder vary by source. The productive-use energy angle is what separates KAMIM from a standard off-grid solar EPC: the cold room is not an energy product; it is an agricultural market access product powered by solar energy.

The CoolCycle innovation is technically differentiated on a dimension that matters in the Nigerian context. It is built from repurposed components of end-of-life diesel generators, which addresses the generator waste problem and the cold storage infrastructure gap in a single design. The ZE-Gen Circularity Challenge panel, which included representatives from the African Circular Economy Network and All On, selected it as the winner from a competitive field that included Husk Power and Nevadic Solar. That validation carries more weight than internal company claims.

KAMIM was appointed as Nigeria delivery lead for HARVIST, a $2.1 million blended capital programme under the UNEP 3DEN Phase II framework, co-implemented with the IEA and with support from Italy’s Ministry of Environment and Energy Security. The programme runs to late 2028. HARVIST deploys modular clean-energy hubs designed to integrate solar cold storage, smart irrigation, IoT monitoring, AI analytics, and digital market access tools across Nigerian agricultural corridors.