Equator, BII Convene "Catalyzing Climate Finance" at Africa Tech Summit 2025
At Equator, we spend a lot of time thinking about what it actually takes to get capital flowing into early-stage climate ventures on the continent. So at the 2025 Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi, we partnered with British International Investment to convene a panel of experts for for a frank conversation about climate finance.
The main stage panel featured a diversity of perspectives from debt investors, to equity investors, to LPs and of course, the operator perspective. We were pleased to welcome:
Samir Ibrahim — Founder & CEO at SunCulture
Helen Lin — Partner at At One Ventures
Chirantan Patnaik — Director of Venture Capital at British International Investment (BII)
Yassine Oussaifi — Partner at AfricInvest Group
The panel was moderated by our managing partner, Nijhad Jamal.
You can watch the full panel discussion here.
Here were 5 takeaways from that conversation:
The numbers are sobering but the opportunity is real. In 2024, just 0.6% of global venture capital found its way to Africa. Of that, roughly a third went to climate tech. And of that climate tech slice, only 10–15% reached early-stage ventures. The tailwinds are on Africa’s side. Falling solar costs, improving battery economics, demographic growth, advances in data and AI, are genuine and powerful. But capital is not following them at the pace the continent needs. This isn't a story of a broken opportunity. It's a story of a broken pipeline. The conditions for climate tech to thrive in Africa are arguably stronger here than anywhere else in the world. Closing that gap is the work.
Investor misconceptions are a tax on founders. African founders have to spend a lot more time than their US or EU counterparts, simply pitching the market opportunity. Global investors arrive with assumptions about African markets that are often decades out of date, which means founders spend enormous energy correcting misconceptions rather than telling their growth story. Until the industry builds a more accurate shared understanding of risk in African markets, this education burden falls disproportionately on the entrepreneurs.
“Built for Market” is as important as novel technology. Investors need to think about innovation from a nuanced perspective. Solutions that take the specific conditions of a given market and turn them into product advantages, rather than obstacles, are critical parts of innovation. Africa is a fast growing market by population and income. Built-for-market products that wouldn’t work anywhere else, can build convincing moats; solar mesh grid designed around the topology of an African village, a vehicle engineered for the road conditions that riders actually face. These are not second-best versions of products designed for richer markets. They are first-best solutions for the markets they serve.
Blended finance isn't innovative — it's just finance. Every major infrastructure project in the world (roads, rail, nuclear, offshore wind) combines equity, debt, and some form of public subsidy or incentive. That is simply how large capital-intensive systems get built. The difference in African climate markets is not the structure. It's that governments often lack the fiscal capacity to provide the subsidy layer directly, so that capital has to be sourced creatively through carbon markets, results-based financing, DFI concessional facilities, or other mechanisms. The word "innovative" in front of blended finance often signals confusion, not sophistication. Removing it, and helping investors see that they're using the same tools they've used in every other infrastructure investment they've made, is one of the most practical things practitioners in this space can do.
DFIs are enablers, not substitutes — and the best founders know the difference. DFI capital plays an important role in African innovation ecosystems, but that role should not be confused with commercial capital. The best founders understand this intuitively. They come to DFIs with clarity around where commercial levers need to sit alongside catalytic capital. They're not asking for capital to figure things out. They're asking for capital to accelerate something that already works or to work as a stopgap for something that’s catching up (an FX mismatch, a warranty tenure gap, a customer adoption barrier) in a way that makes the investment understandable and attractive to the next investor in line. If concessional capital isn't pulling in commercial capital behind it, it's distorting the market, not building it.