Africa’s electric two-wheeler sales jumped from under 1,000 to more than 70,000 in a single year. Five industry leaders explain what could stall that growth.
That figure, drawn from the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook 2026, set the tone for an online panel discussion RMI hosted on 31 August, bringing together voices from policy, finance, fleet operations and manufacturing in Kenya and Nigeria, Africa’s two fastest-moving EV markets.
While the economics already work, what’s missing is the infrastructure, capital and standards to match the demand. Here follows what the panel addressed.
Four-wheeler and heavy-duty adoption still lag well behind, but on two wheels, Kenya already behaves like a mature market.
Two-wheelers already have the numbers
Kelly Carlin of global clean energy think tank RMI opened with the trajectory. Africa’s EV uptake mirrors India’s, he said, where the EV market grew 17-fold between 2020 and 2025, led overwhelmingly by two- and three-wheelers.
In Nigeria, electric two-wheelers already cost less to run than their petrol equivalents, an advantage that widens for battery-swap models. In Kenya, that advantage is more pronounced again in higher-utilisation commercial vehicles.
For Cynthia Kipsang, GIZ Kenya Technical Advisor, the enabler is coordination, not cost: “It has been the ecosystem ownership—looking at how the government and the private sector have been moving together to contribute to e-mobility growth, and the government acknowledging what that means for decarbonising transport, industrial development, job creation and energy security,” she said.
She pointed to Kenya’s National Electric Mobility Policy, launched earlier this year, which targets 100% EV sales by 2040.
Dustin Kahler, EV Industry Advisor with Upeo.Earth, credited three forces:
- early-stage equity investment reaching East African start-ups,
- fiscal incentives from governments including Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda, and
- demand pull from ride-hailing and delivery platforms.
“Demand pull from companies like Greenwheels, Bolt and Uber really provided some early proof points that pulled the market forward,” he enthused.
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Kenya shows where that combination leads. Nairobi has hundreds of battery-swapping stations, panellists said, backed by companies now attracting both equity and debt financing, while BasiGo is scaling electric buses faster than most African markets have managed.
Four-wheeler and heavy-duty adoption still lag well behind, but on two wheels, Kenya already behaves like a mature market.
Charging and swapping hubs often fall back on fossil-fuel generators, undercutting the case for going electric at all.
Infrastructure gaps still slow rollout
Nigeria’s constraints are structural. Olaoluwa Faniyi, SunFi Chief Technology officer and Cofounder, explained that the West African country’s national grid generates roughly 4,000MW for a population of more than 200 million, fleaving it with fewer than 50 public charging stations nationwide.
Charging and swapping hubs in Africa often fall back on fossil-fuel generators, undercutting the case for going electric at all.
Kenya’s problem looks different but lands in the same place. Arturo Osorio, Head of Kenya at Greenwheels Fleet Management, said the market now has competing, uncoordinated charging and swapping networks.
“Every company wants you to buy their bike, subscribe to their infrastructure, their battery swapping, their fast chargers—and there’s not a lot of collaboration happening,” Osorio said. “Everyone wants their product to win, and it creates a battle for space, a battle for energy.”
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Kahler sees the same fragmentation on the capital side. In Kenya, he said: “You might have six different providers that are all providing competing infrastructure, and so they’re all underutilised.” His fix would be co-location, with shared charging and swapping infrastructure that multiple operators build on, rather than each company duplicating the same network at its own cost.
Faniyi agreed that standardisation is critical—not just on the hardware side, but also for software and firmware that let fleet operators integrate different systems in the first place. Incompatible firmware and a lack of local operational support, he said, are still problematic for operators who are trying to deploy across networks.
Financing and standards unlock growth
Habib Nuhu, Market Intelligence and Research Manager at Shell Foundation, pinpointed the structural gap of currency mismatch. Most EV investment in Africa comes from non-African institutions and are denominated in dollars, while the companies receiving it earn in naira or shillings.
“There is a mismatch between the money coming in and the money that is being used,” Nuhu said. Unlocking domestic capital through local banks and pension funds would in his view, be the next frontier.
Shell Foundation’s proposed fix is a sector-wide risk-sharing platform that pools financial institutions around a collateralised asset class, letting operators register electric bikes under a shared scheme rather than negotiating financing one lender at a time.
Kipsang pointed to a parallel opportunity in policy delivery. Development partners such as GIZ “bring in the convening power, the technical expertise” to keep policy evidence-based once it moves into implementation, she said, pointing to feasibility studies GIZ has backed on charging infrastructure, local manufacturing and battery circularity, alongside advocacy through the Electric Mobility Association of Kenya’s annual market white papers.
Carlin framed Kenya’s opportunity in three parts:
- turning an ambitious national policy into detailed, consistent subnational implementation;
- scaling affordable EV financing through blended finance; and
- treating charging load as a business opportunity for utilities such as Kenya Power, rather than an afterthought.
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Cost of capital remains the threat
Even where the economics work, Kahler warned, the maths only holds under conditions unique to Africa. “Africans have to pay more for their lives,” he said. “In East Africa, you’re looking at 30 to 40% total-cost-of-ownership savings on a daily basis, even with 60 to 80% APRs, which sounds crazy to somebody in Southeast Asia paying under 10%.”
APRs (annual percentage rates) are the yearly cost of borrowing (interest plus fees), expressed as a percentage of the loan amount.
“The utilisation is so high that the economics still make sense.” Still, that high utilisation is carrying the whole model and it cannot compensate forever for a capex-intensive, countrywide swap network built on structurally expensive capital.
Nuhu raised the related risk of leaning too hard on government to move at the industry’s pace. Nigeria’s Lagos and Ogun states, he suggested, show a more reliable route whereby state-level policy scales into a national approach once proven, rather than waiting for a single national framework to move first.
Asked to sum up the market’s future in one phrase, Kahler said: “Inevitable but messy“. The panel’s own account of Africa’s EV transition—outsized growth, thin infrastructure, expensive capital and an ecosystem still working out how to collaborate rather than compete—supports his outlook.
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