Enabling electric vehicle adoption with innovative financing and infrastructure

The two million internal combustion engine (ICE) motorbikes in Kenya are responsible for 7 percent of the country’s carbon emissions. Electric two-wheelers (E2Ws) are estimated to be 25% more cost effective, but not widely adopted. The research team hypothesises that lack of suitable financing and charging infrastructure are key adoption barriers, and proposes a field experiment in which they create variation in financial contract form and access to charging to evaluate these barriers. The results will document understudied barriers to firms’ adoption of green technology based on limited access to input markets, and will inform policy because the right model of financing and charging could allow private capital to provide E2W financing at scale and fundamentally change the industry.