**6. Conclusions**

Electrification of agriculture is one of the main drivers for improving agricultural production and income of local farmers. Such investments have very low payback periods for the developing world and also present multiple site-benefits, such as reduced immigration to the big cities and abroad, creation of new jobs, increase of income, improvement of living conditions, and, ultimately, poverty alleviation.

The electrification of households is a challenging investment, as can be seen in Section 3.1. This is why the electrification of productive uses of energy has been proposed throughout the last decade in order to make both the electrification investments viable and improve the socio-economic conditions of these areas. Even with new digital technologies and business models developed in the last few years, it is very difficult to deploy viable microgrid investments through only commercial lending.

With the aid of digital technologies, it is easy to understand that the profits presented by agricultural electrification are so high, they can actually cross-subsidize household electrification. If the agricultural cooperatives and businesses becomes the main investor in a household electrification activity and this is considered a part of an agricultural electrification investment, it is possible to see higher electrification rates in the short term. This approach is fully in line with the guidelines for institutional and policy frameworks for microgrids that have been adopted by the African Union Commission and are also fully in line with the policy and regulatory frameworks of many Sub-Saharan African countries.

This paper provides justification for why such business models need to be developed further, applied, pilot tested, and evaluated in Sub-Saharan Africa.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, G.K.; methodology, G.K. and A.T.B.; software, G.K.; validation, G.K. and D.B.; investigation, G.K.; resources, G.K. and A.T.B.; data curation, G.K. and D.B.; writing—original draft preparation, G.K.; writing—review and editing, D.B. and A.T.B.; visualization, G.K. and A.B.; supervision, D.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
