The Funding Gap Isn't About Capital. It's About Infrastructure.
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Reflections from the ARE Energy Access Investment Forum 2026
At the ARE Energy Access Investment Forum in Nairobi last week, a high-level panel on private-sector funding for electricity access surfaced a diagnosis that anyone working in energy access finance should take seriously. The constraint on SDG7 progress is not a shortage of capital. It is that capital cannot reach the operators who need it because the deals are too small, too fragmented, and too costly to underwrite individually.
Behind that structural problem is a human one. For a distributor in Tanzania, Kenya, or Benin, the gap between a performing receivables book and available liquidity is the difference between reaching more customers this quarter or not. These are businesses serving communities that still have no reliable electricity. Closing the financing gap isn't an abstract capital markets exercise. It's what determines whether SDG7 remains aspirational or becomes real.
Edward Claessen, Head of Regional Hub for East Africa at the European Investment Bank, put it plainly: the sector needs aggregation to address the minimum ticket size problem, and it needs standardised deal structures rather than bespoke, one-off transactions. Panellists including representatives from UNDP, the World Bank Group's M300 initiative, Schneider Electric, and GAIA Impact echoed the same conclusion.
This is not a new observation. But with four years left until the 2030 deadline for universal energy access, the gap between diagnosis and execution is becoming harder to sustain.
Where capital gets stuck
The energy access sector has over 150 small and mid-sized operators distributing solar home systems, clean cookstoves, productive-use appliances, and other essential assets on credit across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Their receivables books represent real, performing portfolios — customers making regular repayments on assets they need and use.
Yet institutional investors such as the DFIs, climate funds, and credit investors with mandates aligned to exactly this kind of exposure, struggle to deploy. The reasons are structural, not motivational. Each operator runs different systems. Portfolio data is inconsistent. Due diligence on a single small company costs nearly as much as on a large one. And without standardised structures, every transaction is a one-off negotiation. The result: 72% of off-grid energy funding flows to just seven large companies. Everyone else competes for the remaining 28% as reported in this Energy4Impact State of the Market report.
For operators, this creates a painful cycle. They hold growing receivables books but cannot convert them into liquidity without either dilutive equity raises or slow, expensive debt processes. Growth stalls, not because demand is missing, but because working capital is trapped on the balance sheet.
What infrastructure-level aggregation looks like
The aggregation the panel called for is not simply bundling companies together under a single fund. It requires something more precise: a mechanism that standardises portfolio data across operators, assesses receivables quality at the pool level, and channels capital through repeatable, monitored structures.
For distributors and originators, Bridgin provides a path to off-balance-sheet financing through receivables purchasing. An operator connects their loan management platform — whether Masunga's own operations product, PaygOps, or another system — and Bridgin ingests, normalises, and standardises the portfolio data. Eligible receivables are packaged into pools that investors can analyse and purchase directly. The operator receives upfront liquidity with no repayment schedule and no equity dilution. Customer repayments route automatically to investors. The operator keeps servicing the portfolio and retains the customer relationship.
For investors and capital providers, Bridgin addresses the due diligence cost and data fragmentation problems that the EAIF panel identified. Standardised data pipelines mean that portfolio quality, payment behaviour, churn, and collection rates are visible at a granular level — before purchase and on an ongoing basis. Ring-fenced financing vehicles isolate each pool. Automated payment routing and back-up servicing provide structural protections. And because the structure is repeatable, the second transaction with a new originator costs a fraction of the first.
Why the operations layer matters
Aggregation only works if the underlying data is trustworthy. This is the connection between Masunga's two capabilities that makes the model defensible.
The operations layer produces clean, standardised repayment and servicing signals across operators. The financing layer uses those signals to forecast pool cashflows, set eligibility criteria, price receivables, and monitor performance over time. This is portfolio underwriting driven by observed behaviour and cohort performance — not projections built on narratives.
When the EIB calls for standardisation, this is what it looks like in practice: not a top-down reporting framework imposed on operators, but infrastructure that generates standardised data as a byproduct of running efficient operations.
From diagnosis to execution
The convergence at EAIF 2026 was notable. Capital providers, development institutions, and sector bodies all identified the same bottleneck — and all pointed toward aggregation and standardisation as the answer. The question is no longer whether this infrastructure is needed. It is whether we can build and deploy it fast enough.
Bridgin is early but validated. The structural approach — receivables purchasing through ring-fenced vehicles with continuous monitoring — has been tested. The pipeline of operators seeking this kind of non-dilutive liquidity is growing. And the investor interest in standardised, impact-aligned receivables exposure is real.
The sector has spent years discussing the funding gap. At Masunga we're building the infrastructure to close it and we're doing it now.
Bridgin is a Masunga product
→ Distributors and originators: If you run a receivables portfolio and want to explore non-dilutive liquidity, we'd love to talk. Reach out to learn whether your portfolio is eligible for Bridgin's receivables purchasing programme.
→ Investors and capital providers: If you're looking for standardised, impact-aligned exposure to emerging-market consumer credit, get in touch to learn more about investing in Bridgin pools.
