Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) working in Nigeria’s waste-to-wealth sector may soon find it easier to secure international funding.
The Africa Green Economy and Sustainability Institute (AGESI) has unveiled a new set of targeted guidelines designed to make localised green initiatives “bankable” for international donors and commercial banks.
The initiative, launched in collaboration with the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC), directly addresses a glaring irony in Nigeria’s green economy: while small businesses drive the front lines of recycling, clean cooking, and climate-smart agriculture, they receive almost none of the available global climate finance.
According to AGESI’s newly released policy dialogue report, the barrier keeping small entrepreneurs from accessing capital is not a lack of innovation, but a lack of structural verification. International development finance institutions (DFIs) operate under strict compliance mandates.
They require every investment to feature rigorous Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks and verifiable Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) data.
For a typical Nigerian MSME, meeting these standards is nearly impossible. Most operate under informal business structures, lack carbon-accounting mechanisms, and cannot legally prove “additionality”—the regulatory guarantee that their projects yield carbon reductions that wouldn’t occur otherwise.
“The domestic banking sector is not inherently hostile to funding green projects; it is simply navigating a cloud of uncertainty,” explained Amandla Uzorka-Jarrett, a private-sector sustainability expert who contributed to the guidelines. “Without clear metrics, banks cannot perform due diligence, price climate risks, or confidently back a local entrepreneur.”
To level the playing field, AGESI is deploying its proprietary FIPRE scoring system, which evaluates projects across five pillars: Function, Impact, Prosperity, Resilience, and Equity.
Instead of forcing a small recycling business to independently develop a costly ESG framework from scratch, FIPRE acts as a plug-and-play operating system. It translates a grassroots business’s everyday operations into a standardised score that global donors can easily verify.
