Pitch a Productive Use Financing Scheme for Rural Solar in Benue State

Benue State is one of Nigeria's largest producers of soybeans, sesame, and yam. Most processing, such as grinding, drying, and milling, still depends on diesel generators or is done manually, which drives up costs and post-harvest losses. Solar-powered processing equipment exists and has been piloted elsewhere, but uptake is near zero because rural smallholders cannot afford the upfront cost and formal credit is inaccessible to them. Productive use financing solves this by tying loan repayments to verifiable income from the equipment itself. A soybean processor who buys a solar grain dryer pays back from the margin improvement that dryer creates. The model has worked in Kenya and Rwanda but has barely been attempted in Nigeria's Middle Belt, partly because of the absence of a reliable off-taker or revenue data infrastructure. Your deliverable is a 12-slide pitch deck targeting a development finance institution or impact investor, accompanied by a one-tab financial model showing unit economics for a single borrower over 36 months. The model should show the loan size, interest rate, repayment schedule, and the processor's net income change. The deck should cover the problem, the solution, the target customer, the lending mechanics, risk factors, and what a pilot would look like. A strong submission treats this as a real pitch, not a school project. That means realistic figures drawn from sources like the World Bank, USAID, or published reports from organisations like GOGLA or GSMA. It also means honest treatment of risk: what actually goes wrong in schemes like this and how the design accounts for it.