Introducing SPARC+CM: How We Are Turning Lagos Schools Into Solar Energy Hubs

This month, SPARC+CM begins its founding deployment in Lagos, Nigeria, at two schools that could not be more different in profile: Padre Monti Catholic College, a lower-fee Catholic secondary school in Abijo, and Abba's Heart Montessori School, a higher-fee institution already running on off-grid solar in Ibeju-Lekki. Between them, they represent the two ends of the fee spectrum SPARC+CM is designed to serve.

The programme's premise is simple to state and hard to deliver: solar electricity for the school first, always and unconditionally, with any surplus used to charge electric school buses and then to power public EV charging points at the school perimeter. Every layer is financed by the layer below it, which is why no school pays anything upfront.

At PMCC, that means a circularly remanufactured Toyota HiAce and a 120kWp rooftop solar-storage system. At Abba's Heart, it means a new electric bus financed through a concessional loan, layered onto an existing 200kWp installation that has quietly run the school since 2019.

Over the next eighteen months, both schools will generate the operating data that underpins everything else in this programme: fuel savings, teaching hours recovered, and the first independently verified performance figures for a solar-retrofit nexus of this kind anywhere in West Africa.