How software became the missing piece in Nigeria’s energy access challenge

In August 2024, Travis Adkins, chief executive of the United States African Development Foundation, travelled to Lagos to announce a $250,000 grant to Reeddi, a company building portable energy solutions for off-grid communities. The announcement focused on the Reeddi Capsule, a portable battery unit recognised by TIME Magazine as one of the best inventions of 2021 and shortlisted for Earthshot Prize. The hardware dominated the narrative.

But that narrative was incomplete.

What went largely unexamined was the software infrastructure that made the grant defensible. A back-office platform managing thousands of energy unit rentals across Nigeria. A financing system extending asset ownership to Nigerians excluded from formal credit. A logistics engine coordinating capsule distribution across communities where infrastructure remains unreliable. Three platforms, built by a small engineering team, that collectively demonstrated Reeddi’s ability to operate at scale.

Roughly 46 million Nigerians lack reliable access to electricity. Closing that gap is not simply a question of deploying more batteries. It requires systems capable of managing inventory, processing transactions, assessing creditworthiness, and tracking environmental outcomes across thousands of devices and users simultaneously, under the constraints that define daily life in underserved communities.

“Energy access is not just a hardware problem. It is a software problem, and the code remains largely invisible,” said an expert.

Building for infrastructure that does not cooperate

The central constraint in Nigeria’s off-grid environment is straightforward. Systems must function when connectivity fails. In many communities, electricity and internet access break down at the same time, precisely when users need to complete transactions.

This constraint has driven the adoption of offline-first architectures. Transactions are executed locally and synchronised when connectivity returns. Achieving this requires careful handling of conflict resolution, data integrity, and local storage. The result is a 99 percent transaction success rate in areas where conventional online-dependent systems would struggle to operate.

Reliability at scale demands further architectural discipline. Monolithic systems expose operations to single points of failure. In contrast, microservices architectures supported by message queues allow different components to function independently. Pressure on billing does not disrupt inventory. Failures in one service do not cascade across the platform. The result is 99.9 percent uptime, a meaningful figure when the service being delivered is electricity.

The integration of connected devices introduces an additional layer of complexity. Energy units require real-time monitoring, remote control, and continuous health tracking. Building infrastructure capable of maintaining stable communication with thousands of deployed devices, under field conditions rather than controlled environments, requires the integration of embedded systems with distributed backend architecture. There is no standard blueprint for this in frontier markets.

Three platforms, one operational system

The engineering effort has produced three platforms, each addressing a critical constraint in the energy access value chain.

The back-office rental system functions as the operational core. It manages the full lifecycle of each unit, including inventory, transactions, commissions, and field visibility, across thousands of transactions. More importantly, it generates real-time impact data such as homes powered, emissions reduced, and income created. These are the metrics that informed grant evaluation, not projections, but live operational evidence.

Pluck addresses the structural exclusion embedded in Nigeria’s credit system. Traditional scoring frameworks leave much of the population outside formal finance. By using behavioural data and community validation, alternative credit assessment becomes possible. Payment structures reflect actual income cycles, whether daily, weekly, or monthly. This creates a pathway from energy access to asset ownership that conventional systems have not provided.

Carry, the logistics platform, manages distribution across fragmented and infrastructure-constrained environments. Integration with third-party providers, route optimisation, and real-time tracking have reduced delivery costs by 30 percent. This has enabled expansion without the need for heavy investment in logistics infrastructure.

These systems are not peripheral. They define whether deployment is feasible.

Execution discipline and organisational capacity

Scaling such systems requires more than technical capability. It requires process discipline.

The introduction of continuous integration and deployment pipelines has reduced deployment cycles from over an hour to under five minutes. Code review standards and structured documentation have improved reliability and accountability. Initial resistance to these processes is common, but the productivity gains tend to resolve it.

Team development is equally central. Structured collaboration, ownership of features, and an environment that supports technical questioning improve both efficiency and system resilience. As teams mature, engineers move from execution to ownership, a transition that is essential for scaling operations.

Infrastructure decisions also reflect this discipline. Cloud migration strategies, when executed carefully, can produce significant cost savings. In resource-constrained environments, reductions in operational expenditure translate directly into expanded service delivery.

What the grant decision really revealed

The USADF grant process was, in effect, an assessment of execution capacity. Hardware defined the mission. Software demonstrated the ability to deliver it.

Real-time dashboards provided verifiable data. Engineering processes signalled scalability. System architecture showed resilience under constraint. These elements reduced uncertainty and made the investment credible.

The $250,000 grant, directed toward product improvement and expansion, was therefore not simply funding innovation. It was a response to demonstrated operational capability.

That distinction is increasingly important.

Climate finance is becoming more disciplined. Funders are moving beyond ideas toward systems that can prove scale. In that shift, software is no longer a supporting function. It is the infrastructure through which credibility is established.

A broader lesson for Nigeria’s innovation ecosystem

For Nigeria’s engineering community, the implication is clear. The constraint on climate technology is not only capital, policy, or hardware deployment. It is the ability to build systems that make scale measurable, verifiable, and repeatable.

The engineers building transaction platforms, credit systems, logistics infrastructure, and IoT networks are not peripheral to the climate transition. They are central to its feasibility.

Software is not an accessory to energy access. It is the missing layer that determines whether solutions remain at pilot stage or evolve into systems capable of operating at national scale.

Kelvin Oigiangbe is a Senior Software Engineer at BuildingMinds GmbH in Berlin, where he builds ESG analytics infrastructure for institutional real estate investors.