Zambie
Acumen put $5m of equity into Sun King's Zambian business on 23 September, days after ZESCO completed 1 GW of utility-scale solar power purchase agreements. Zambia is now buying generation at both ends of the market at once, in a system where 83% of electricity comes from hydropower and roughly half the population has no connection at all.
Who Acumen is
Acumen is a non-profit impact investor founded in 2001 by Jacqueline Novogratz, which pioneered the idea of patient capital: long-horizon investment accepting below-market returns to reach customers commercial funds will not serve. The $5m comes from its Hardest-to-Reach (H2R) initiative, launched in 2023, which had raised $250m by January 2026 for 17 African countries. Sandra Halilovic, who heads H2R Catalyze, said the equity is structured to crowd in local-currency debt from Zambian lenders.
How Sun King makes money
Sun King sells solar home systems through more than 500 shops and 43,000 agents across 12 African countries, and ]finances them over 12 to 24 months in daily, weekly or monthly instalments collected by mobile money, with entry-level kits from $0.19 a day. It has extended $1.7bn in consumer financing to date and reaches 58 million people. Acumen expects the Zambian investment to reach nearly 5.6 million people over five years, up to 4.5 million of them connected for the first time.
The other track
ZESCO signed 500 MW with South Korea's KS Eco Solutions in June and another 500 MW with Hungary's EnerSynk on 15 September, a 25-year agreement for a Copperbelt project. Installed solar has gone from 88 MW in 2021 to 841 MW this year, against a 3,000 MW target for 2030. The urgency is recent: during the 2024 drought, available capacity at Kariba fell from 3,777 MW to 1,040 MW and the economy lost around $1.3bn, about 5% of GDP.
What it means
Two tracks, two instruments, two entirely different risks. The utility-scale half is 25-year PPA paper written against a state offtaker, underwritten on sovereign and currency risk. The off-grid half is equity into a consumer lending book collected in kwacha by mobile money, underwritten on repayment behaviour among first-time customers. Neither substitutes for the other, because the 1 GW serves the connected half and the mines while Sun King's kit serves households the grid will not reach this decade. For an investor the useful question is no longer whether to back Zambian solar but which of the two credits is actually on offer, because the phrase now covers both.
Sources: AVCA, Mercomcapital:, EcofinAgency, Renewableenergymagazine
