THE CARBON WAR

Must do, can do, will do 179
households money within weeks: a no-brainer sale, even to some of the poorest
people in the world.
I figured Africa might be a good place for an adventure in social entrepreneurship
to test this idea. If fossil fuel could be knocked out in one sector
there, on purely economic grounds, knocking other sectors out as clean-energy
costs fall would seem increasingly credible.
I founded SolarAid to chase the mission, a charity to be funded with 5%
of the annual profits from Solarcentury, the much more conventional solar
company I had founded in the developed world. Conventional capital like
the venture capital backing Solarcentury would be unlikely to pioneer new
African markets in solar lighting fast, I reasoned. My experience was that it
would be too risk-averse to face African frontier conditions, and that investors
would sound the retreat too quickly in the face of setbacks. I wanted to test
the idea that a different financing model – a mix of philanthropic donations
and low-interest debt, mostly crowd-funded – was the best way to crack open
the first mass markets.
SolarAid set up a retail arm, SunnyMoney, to experiment with the new
model in 2008. The idea was that all profits (once they eventually materialised)
would be recycled back into the mission, and the retail operation, although
functioning like a conventional business, would remain wholly owned by the
charity. We began in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia, but our mission was
to play a lead role in ridding every African country of kerosene lighting by 2020.
Progress was at first slow. Then the teams in the field found a model that
worked. It involved schools. SolarAid makes available the details of how this
model works on an open-source basis.
Sales rocketed in 2013 and 2014. SunnyMoney has now sold 1.7 million
lights, making it the biggest retailer of solar lighting on the continent. Most
sales are in Kenya and Tanzania, where proper markets are now functioning
as venture capital and impact investment flow in behind SunnyMoney’s start,
as we always intended.
Our 1.7 million lights have improved the lives often million Africans
so far. Over the three-year product lifetimes, we are in the process of saving
$360 million, averting 890 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and creating
two billion extra homework hours. That is just where the social benefits begin.
The question now is whether we can replicate this market kick-start model
in other countries, particularly the “big three” in terms of population: Nigeria,
Ethiopia and Congo.