BusinessDay
Oladehinde Oladipo
May 4, 2026
When Dr Nabilah Sani Mohammed first arrived in Marayar Rogo, a community in northern Nigeria, she saw something that made her understand the problem she was trying to solve. There was no electricity pole in sight.
No electricity grid was available. No cables were connected between houses. No artificial light was visible after sundown.
The village was full of people who came out to greet her team, including men, women and children. They all had a quiet sense of expectation. This welcome changed the way Dr Nabilah Sani Mohammed thought about the Solar Project.

That visit became the reason why the DARES project started. The DARES project is a solar electrification initiative that targets some of the energy-isolated communities in Nigeria’s north.

Months later, aluminium conductor cables now stretch across Marayar Rogos footpaths. Electricity poles stand where none existed before. Solar panels cover land that was recently farmland.
The Solar Project is not yet finished. In a country where roughly 85 million people still lack electricity access, the Solar Project in communities like Marayar Rogo, Ballagaza, Mekiya and Dagar is worth watching closely.

The Solar Project is not about numbers. It is about the geography of Nigeria, the financing of the Solar Project, and the people’s trust. Rural communities in the north are frequently too remote and sparsely populated to attract conventional grid investment. The economics of the Solar Project rarely work.
Development projects that start with equipment and promise only to stop or disappear have left many communities skeptical. The DARES model tries to address that skepticism from the start. Then, arriving with a construction crew and a timeline, the Solar Project team talked to the community first.

They met with leaders, introduced the Solar Projects’ goals, and hired local residents to work directly on construction, clearing land, supporting installation, and contributing to the physical build.

The Solar Project became a community project. Nabilah Sani Mohammed wrote that the Solar Project was no longer a project, it became the community’s project.
That approach to community ownership is important for rural energy projects to succeed. Equipment can be replaced. Community support is harder to get after the fact. The financing of the Solar Project was not easy. Reaching close to a rural electrification project in northern Nigeria is not a simple process. It requires working with institutions surviving extended due diligence cycles and maintaining momentum through repeated rounds of queries and revisions.
For the DARES project, that process was difficult. There were delays. There were times when progress felt slow. Financial close was eventually achieved, and with it came something beyond the money itself: validation that the Solar Project was viable and could proceed at scale. That milestone marked the shift from possibility to commitment.

On the ground the evidence of that commitment is now visible. In Marayar Rogo and Ballagaza solar mounting structures stand on what was empty land. Solar panels are. Cabling is in place. The communities, which had no electricity infrastructure of any kind when the Solar Project team first visited, are now in the stages of domestic connection.
The logistics of getting there were not always easy. On one field visit to Ballagaza the team’s vehicle broke down on the approach road. They continued the journey by tricycle, arriving after dark. The darkness was a reminder of what energy poverty feels like on the ground. The Solar Project team understands that the broader context matters.
The federal government has set rural electrification targets and international development institutions have poured significant capital into the sector.

Yet execution remains difficult. Insecurity in parts of the north complicates logistics, supply chains are unreliable and community relations can derail projects entirely.

What makes the DARES project different is the insistence on working through complexity rather than around it. The Solar Project team engages communities before construction, employs labour and maintains presence through delays. Dr Nabilah Sani Mohammed recently received an email from a Marayar Rogo resident thanking her team for the work underway.
She read it more than once. Development is typically measured in megawatts and kilometres of cable. The Solar Project will eventually be measured that way, too.
In Marayar Rogo, where a community once gathered in hope before a team that arrived with plans and no poles, the more immediate measure is simpler. Electricity poles now stand, cables now. Light is coming. When it arrives, it will arrive in a community that helped build the Solar Project.

Dipo Oladehinde is a skilled energy analyst with experience across Nigeria’s energy sector alongside relevant know-how about Nigeria’s macro economy. He provides a blend of market intelligence, financial analysis, industry insight, micro and macro-level analysis of a wide range of local and international issues as well as informed technical rudiments for policy-making and private directions.
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