Innovative finance in humanitarian settings: The potential for aggregator funds to expand access to modern energy services

Access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy remains one of the most pressing challenges in humanitarian settings. Aggregator funds serve as financial intermediaries that pool capital from multiple sources, repackage it into MSME-appropriate instruments, offering the potential to transform fragmented transactions into an investable asset class. This study draws upon expert interviews ( n = 12), a practitioner workshop with 40 last-mile energy distributors in Uganda, and two in-depth case studies of emergent aggregator mechanisms (the Refugee Environmental Protection Fund and the P-REC Aggregation Facility) to examine their potential for addressing financing gaps for energy distributors operating in humanitarian settings. Guided by a novel analytical framework grounded in financial intermediation theory, institutional theory, and market-shaping literature, the analysis identifies five financing gaps (scale, risk, information, capacity, and time) and assesses the market-building potential of aggregator funds. The findings revealed systemic barriers restricting MSME access to finance, especially the timing misalignment between the short humanitarian funding cycles and the long-term capital needs. The case studies point to genuine innovation and growing private sector appetite to serve last-mile settings, although findings remain largely exploratory and only indicative of real market trends. They also show how institutional environments hamper execution, and complex funds may distract from the basic need for patient working capital. It concludes that aggregator funds offer promise but require institutional reform to achieve scale or sustainability.