THE CARBON WAR

Chapter 6
He who brings light
Kenya, 3 rd February 2014
A crack-of-dawn flight from Nairobi, west to Eldoret. A field team of three
from SolarAid’s retail arm, SunnyMoney, meets me at the airport, and we
drive in a van nearly two hours further west, to Bungoma, a market town near
the border with Uganda. Along the way, greenery; fields of maize, cropped;
sugarcane, uncropped. This is the breadbasket of Kenya.
A street in that teeming town. The Wells Fargo depot: one of the booths
in one of the concrete multi-shop facades with hand-painted signs, next to
a wood yard. Every second shop seems to bear a green M-Pesa logo. This
pay-by-mobile brand has gone from nowhere to everywhere in the last ten
years. A little of this kind of market penetration is what SunnyMoney will
need, I reflect, if SolarAid is to sell enough lights across Africa to achieve our
mission of playing a lead role in ridding the continent of kerosene lanterns by
the end of the decade.
We fill the van with freshly-delivered boxes of solar lights. Thirty boxes,
ten lights apiece. I do a rough calculation. We have sold 500,000 in the last
six months, across our four countries of operation. That’s 1,600 loads like this.
In the centre of town sits a Total filling station. We have seen several such
along the way. Total is the second biggest seller of solar lanterns in Africa, after
SunnyMoney, retailing from forecourts such as these. They also sell kerosene,
so you could say they are hedging their bets. En route we passed the oil refinery
that serves this region, dozens of tankers in a queue stretching away from it,
sprawling along the roadsides, waiting to be filled with the derivatives of crude
oil delivered by pipeline from Mombasa.
Further along the road to Uganda we turn right, and drive five bouncing
miles down a red earth road, spewing dust behind us. We pass a school,