Nithio Co-Founder and CEO Kate Steel

Watt It Takes

As we speak, there are 600 million people in Africa who lack access to even basic electricity. That’s driven in part by low levels of domestic and foreign investment into electricity infrastructure across the continent: over the last decade, just 3% of capital invested into energy infrastructure worldwide went to Africa.

To enable universal energy access in Africa, we’ll need innovative climate financing solutions that get the right kind of capital to the right kind of projects at the right time.

And that’s exactly what Kate Steel, Co-Founder and CEO of Nithio, is doing. Nithio uses AI-powered analytics to help investors, local banks, and grant-makers understand payment patterns, credit risk, and portfolio quality in the distributed energy space. They also operate a financing vehicle called Nithio FI that provides loans to distributors that need capital to reach the millions of households with no or unreliable energy access.

In this episode, Emily sits down with Kate to hear about the high school ditch day that introduced her to engineering, her journey in energy access, and the work Nithio is doing financing electricity access across Africa.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures and SPAN.

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