Electrifying logistics: Why Nigeria’s next delivery advantage may run on batteries

Every morning in Lagos, thousands of dispatch riders are on the road. Bikes weave through early-morning traffic on Apapa Road, tricycles load up outside Mile 2 markets, and vans queue outside cold stores in Ojota. By the time the average Lagos resident opens their phone to track a delivery, that package has already burned through half a litre of petrol. Multiply that by the 75,000 commercial vehicles currently operating in Lagos alone, add the roughly 13,000 newly registered in the past year, and you have a logistics sector spending billions of naira on fuel before it has earned anything.

The removal of the fuel subsidy permanently changed the transport and logistics sector. What was previously absorbed by government subsidies is now felt directly by riders, fleet managers, and the small businesses that depend on them. Delivery costs have climbed, margins have thinned, and the pressure is unlikely to ease. Yet the numbers suggest a more useful question: what would it cost to stop buying fuel altogether?

The answer is more achievable than it sounds, and Nigeria already has companies testing it.

MAX has deployed 17 charging stations across Lagos and piloted electric-motorcycle transitions with DHL and Aramex, with partnership agreements in place with Uber and Bolt for electric delivery. Ecokada operates two fully off-grid charging and battery-swap stations in Lagos. Oando Clean Energy has launched electric-bus pilots on BRT routes in partnership with LAMATA. Possible EVs, Siltech, and JET Motor Company are assembling or distributing electric vehicles in the market. These are commercial operations that run in the same traffic and serve the same customers as their petrol-powered competition.

What makes their approach workable in a country where the national grid delivers roughly 4,500 to 5,000 megawatts, while demand exceeds 30,000 megawatts, is that they have bypassed the grid entirely. Solar-hybrid charging systems, standalone renewable installations, and battery-swap infrastructure have become the technical foundation of Nigeria’s emerging EV network. A delivery bike does not need a functioning grid connection. It needs a battery-swap station on its route, which is a solvable problem on a timeline that matters to a logistics operator planning for next year.

The commercial case is strongest at the unit level. In India, research by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water shows that electric delivery bikes cost up to 40% less per kilometre to operate than petrol models, with maintenance costs roughly half those of comparable ICE alternatives. One logistics operator in Mumbai recorded savings of nearly $600 per rider annually on an e-bike covering 80 kilometres daily. Flipkart has committed to 25,000 electric vehicles by 2030. Amazon India already operates more than 6,000. The motive is purely commercial. The numbers work.

Brazil demonstrates the same logic at a larger scale. Ambev has begun replacing diesel trucks with more than 1,600 electric models across dense urban and regional routes, with operating costs falling by as much as 30% over five years. São Paulo’s logistics infrastructure now includes overnight charging depots that keep fleets moving without the unpredictability of fuel supply chains. For a company managing just-in-time delivery across multiple cities, that reliability has its own financial value.

The peer examples closer to home may be the most telling. Kenya and Rwanda have developed battery-swapping ecosystems and renewable-powered charging corridors, which have meaningfully reduced the total cost of ownership for commercial two- and three-wheelers. Africa’s e-mobility market is tracking at 38% year-on-year growth in this segment, the category that forms the backbone of Nigeria’s last-mile delivery economy. The commercial motorcycles and tricycles moving goods through Lagos, Onitsha, Aba, and Kano are the circulatory system of both the informal and formal logistics sectors.

For Nigeria, electrifying this segment first is both the most financially sound and the most practical path. Two- and three-wheelers have smaller batteries suited to intermittent power or to solar-fed swap stations. Their routes are predictable. Their operators bear their own fuel costs directly, making them acutely sensitive to reductions in operating expenses. Replacing 10% of Lagos’s commercial vehicle fleet with electric models could generate annual savings of around 54 billion naira in fuel spend alone, based on conservative modelling of the current fleet size and average fuel consumption.

The interstate corridor opportunity operates at a different scale. The Lagos to Calabar coastal road under construction offers the clearest opening for Nigeria’s first dedicated electric logistics corridor, with charging infrastructure spaced every 120 kilometres, within the operational range of current commercial EV technology. In Brazil, electric trucks on regional supply chains reduce maintenance downtime by 20% compared with diesel equivalents. That outcome can be designed into the infrastructure from the outset rather than discovered after deployment.

Access to affordable capital remains the binding constraint. High interest rates and lender reluctance are keeping most projects at a pilot scale.

In 2025, our firm, The Bopfa Company, led an in-depth research study into this, resulting in the white paper Bridging the Gap: Building Nigeria’s E-Mobility Infrastructure for 2060, authored in conjunction with Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), GreenMax Capital, and the Nigeria Off-Grid Market Accelerator Programme. We identified the structures needed to overcome lenders’ reluctance to finance unfamiliar business models: risk-sharing facilities that provide first-loss protection to lenders, standardised PPP models that enable multi-site deployment, and naira-denominated green bonds backed by contracted cash flows from charging. Each of these instruments exists in other markets and can be adapted to suit the Nigerian market.

I cannot overstate the role of policy, which no financing structure can replace. Import duty waivers on EV components, time-limited tax incentives for local assembly, and dedicated EV tariffs from distribution companies would each improve the unit economics of electric vehicles relative to petrol vehicles for fleet operators. South Africa introduced a 150% tax deduction for qualifying EV production from 2026. Morocco has committed nearly $140 million in private investment to deploy 5,000 charging stations by 2028, directly linked to its renewable energy infrastructure. Neither country is identical to Nigeria, but both demonstrate that clear, consistent policy signals attract private capital.

These policy considerations and financing structures can only create impact when we develop the most important resource, the workforce. The NADDC’s partnership with MEMACO to establish the Training and Vocational Academy aims to equip 10,000 workers with EV-specific skills. Lagos State University of Science and Technology has launched an advanced training centre for the same purpose. Most notably, the E-mobility Promoters Association of Nigeria (EMPAN), in its commitment to building technical skills, awareness, and workforce readiness for Nigeria’s growing e-mobility ecosystem, hosted a Free EV Training Programme for Roadside Mechanics in Lagos in 2025. At the scale Nigeria needs to reach, limited local technical capacity becomes the binding constraint on deployment speed, and closing that gap early is cheaper than addressing it later.

Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan sets a target of 100% electric vehicle sales by 2060. Our research shows that meeting that target requires 98 million electric vehicles, more than 1.5 million public charging stations, and more than $700 billion in total investment. Those figures describe the destination. Starting with the components that pay for themselves earliest makes the journey viable. In Nigeria’s logistics economy, those components are the dispatch bikes on Apapa Road, the delivery vans in Onitsha, and the tricycles carrying goods through markets no four-wheeled vehicle can reach.

The evidence from India, Brazil, Kenya, and Lagos’s own streets has settled the question of whether electric vehicles will matter to Nigerian logistics. What remains is how much of the savings and commercial advantage local operators will capture before others do.

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