Project Description

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Getting Pumped: A Quest to Finance Solar Irrigation in Kenya

By Evgenia Sokolova,

Blended Finance Consultant to Winrock’s Clean Energy Innovations team


“I fell in love with that water pump the first time I saw it,” said Joshua Okundi, a passion-fruit farmer from Kendu Bay. Okundi (pictured above, center, with blue cap) is one of the 9,000 farmers who saw the solar pump at one of the joint Winrock-Kenya Agricultural Value Chain Enterprises (KAVES) demonstration events in 2015 and expressed an interest in purchasing it.

Only nine of those farmers were able to pay cash up front, though — the pump sells for $650 — and Okundi wasn’t one of them. Like most farmers, he needed a loan to purchase the pump, and at that time only one bank, Equity, was lending.

Farmer after farmer told us they wanted the pump but no bank would give them credit.

(Full blog post here)

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