M-KOPA and the price of patience: How impact capital became market education

IN DECEMBER 2016, I sat down with Chad Larson, M-KOPA co-founder and CFO at the time, for an African Tech Roundup podcast conversation about their solar home systems business.

- Andile Masuku is Co-founder and Executive Producer at African Tech Roundup. Connect and engage with Andile on X (@MasukuAndile) and via LinkedIn. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL.

The ground: What was promised

With the precision you'd expect from a former Bain consultant and Bank of America investment banker, he explained that M-KOPA's grant funding (from Shell Foundation, Gates Foundation and others) didn't subsidise customers. It funded capacity building, the tech platform, upskilling the team. The customer proposition, he insisted, stood entirely on its own commercial merit.

He was technically accurate. That farmer in Kenya's Central Highlands paying for her solar panel wasn't getting a discount courtesy of philanthropic capital.

Fast forward to October 2025. Stephen Deng, co-founder and general partner (GP) at venture capital (VC) firm DES Lab, remarked on X that M-KOPA's growth and profitability were built on “millions and millions in equity and debt earmarked for climate / PAYGO [Pay-As-You-Go] solar." Today, M-KOPA is primarily a smartphone finance and digital credit services platform; solar is no longer its dominant product axis.

Between these moments: a decade, a fundamental business model transformation, and finally, profitability.

The pattern: Who gets to spend a decade discovering

M-KOPA used patient impact capital to run a decade-long experiment in African consumer behaviour. But let's be explicit about why they got that runway.

My 2016 scepticism about obscene data extraction wasn't wrong, it was premature. The solar system was the hook; the credit data infrastructure became the prize.

The principle: The infrastructure substitution fallacy

This raises questions beyond M-KOPA specifically, about whether these models are even intellectually coherent.