Our customers deploy and operate these grids. When our equipment or our processes fall short, their end users lose power and the developer loses income. Nigeria's off-grid sector is about to grow quickly, with programmes such as DARES funding a new wave of connections, and developers, lenders and regulators need to know what fails in the field and how fast it gets fixed. So we are publishing our own failures with the numbers attached. We have not named the developers involved; each of them lived through these problems with us.
Inverters have to survive the appliances people actually plug in
From August 2023, a customer started deploying in markets, the exact productive use case we wanted to see for mesh-grids. However they reported inverters with no AC output, and sometimes a Pod that stopped supplying power altogether. Our investigation found that the switches and controls in the inverter could not respond fast enough during inductive and non-linear loads (mobile phone charging shops are very difficult loads for inverters) and spikes or short circuits. On the Pod side, the V3 Pods allowed these harsh load spikes to damage the productive-load switches (MOSFETs), leading to Pod failures as well.
What we changed
- We redesigned the inverter with faster controls and higher-rated components, and also applied the same upgrades to every failed old-generation unit. None of the new or repaired units with these upgrades has failed yet.
- The next-generation Pod, V4, carries heavier protections on the productive-load port. These include a higher-range current sensor, faster shutoff, and a diode on the battery rail that absorbs voltage spikes, so the Pod responds better to short circuits and surges. To pass these benefits to older deployments too, we upgraded all V3 Pods in high-power-consumption households to V4, from our own stock.
A single mobile network is a single point of failure
On 10 February 2026, MTN's 2G network suffered a prolonged outage across Nigeria. Our legacy fleet connected over 2G IoT SIMs, many of them on MTN. Pods that lost connection could not be billed or topped up remotely.
What we changed
- On 25 February our SIM provider moved every offline MTN SIM to a larger data plan and removed MTN from the allowed networks. Most of the fleet now runs on Airtel, and bulk SIM resets are a standard support procedure.
- New projects run on OkraNet, our radio mesh network, so Pods pass data through each other and back to a central gateway instead of each depending on a sunsetting 2G signal.
- Mobile data coverage is now required at a single point in the site, not across the whole site as 2G needed, verified by Okra before a project goes ahead.
Still open. Some legacy systems were deployed as standalone, isolated systems where there is no usable mobile coverage at all. For these households, where OkraNet is not suitable, offline token billing (planned for release in 2027) is our solution. Until then, those developers bill them manually.
Moving equipment between operators needs a process, not just a sale
In August 2025 a developer leaving the sector sold its 386 kits to another developer. Contractors removed the equipment without following our decommissioning procedure, and no warranty claims had been raised before the sale. Many Pods still held the previous household's credit state, so the buyer received equipment that would not work out of the box, and filed warranty claims on most of it.
The equipment was outside our process, but we tested and resolved it anyway. Most of the Pods that looked broken turned out to be a process problem, which decommissioning to procedure would have avoided. The inverters were different: many had water damage, either because of where they were installed or because the decommissioned units were poorly stored by the seller or the buyer. We denied warranty on 17 inverters, mostly ones we could show had been soaked, and repaired, replaced or cleared the rest.
These issues made for a painful experience for our customers and their end users. We now have a decommission and transfer protocol. Under it, the selling customer uninstalls to our procedure, and both parties reconcile the inventory and run quality checks on the equipment within a set window. Without those steps, nobody can say where or when equipment was damaged.
The numbers we hold ourselves to
Our support targets are a first response within one hour on weekdays and 90% of tickets resolved within 48 hours.
Building ahead of scale
In the next 12 months we expect another 50,000 to 100,000 connections to be installed in Nigeria alone. Installs and aftersales processes need to keep up with the demand, so we're doubling down on the following:
- Okra Academy. Every installer is certified through our training course and recertified every six months. Every local maintenance agent goes through dedicated training.
- Regional repair partners. Better repair manuals and certified repair centres closer to the communities, so equipment gets fixed without a long trip to Abuja.
- Proactive support. Our grids report data continuously. We are using it to spot faults before they cut a household's power.
We would rather the sector learns from our mistakes than repeats them. If you are a developer, lender or regulator working on energy access in Nigeria and want to compare notes, or you have lessons of your own, we would like to hear from you. Power to the People.
