MKOPA Solar–Lighting Up East Africa One Home At A Time

                           by David Parmer

History might look at our current time and consider it to be the Age of Apps, or even the beginning of the Age of Apps. An age when humanity started plugging technology into just about everything. Perhaps our attempts will appear brave, or wisely chosen. Or our efforts may even be considered to have been trivial in that we are now asking technology to do a lot of things that we ourselves could do more easily and simply “by hand.” (Future generations may smile when they view our apps, the same way that we smile when we see films of “futuristic” products from the 1920s and 1930s.) Maybe history will see a lot of our applications as solutions in search of a problem.

Considering the above, it is refreshing and heartening to learn about Nairobi-based solar company MKOPA. For MKOPA’s application of emerging technology is anything but trivial–it is changing the lives of thousands of people in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in a very significant way. MKOPA is bringing light and power (in the broadest sense) to off-grid Africans and hooking them up with the 21st century.

How? By marrying two technologies: solar and mobile phone payments. A subscriber signs up, pays a small deposit and gets a starter kit consisting of a solar panel, control system, torch (flashlight) mobile device charger, light and portable radio. He or she pays KES50shillings (about U.S .50 cents) per-day via mobile payment in what is essentially a hire-purchase scheme. The mobile payments are managed by another recent startup, M-PESA and are monitored in real-time. This goes on for a year, and then the subscriber becomes the system owner.

User benefits include: light at night to read, study or do business by, a mobile-device charger so the subscriber doesn’t have to borrow or pay for a charge, and a radio to listen to sports, news or weather reports. There are also the benefits of using LED light instead of kerosene lanterns, which include elimination of fuel costs, lack of noxious fumes and the removal of the danger of fire.

And then there are the numbers. The MKOPA story seems to revolve around the numbers. For example, the company has installed systems in more than 330,000 homes, and is adding another 500 homes every day. The company processes in excess of 10,000 payments per-day. It employs 2,000 people over East Africa, both staff and direct sales agents and has a top-notch management team.

So what is next? Next comes the MKOPA TV that was introduced in February 2016, which is in addition to a line of products that includes cookers and smart phones. Not bad for a company that has only been around since 2012. And a final number might be MKOPA’s ambitious sales target–to have systems in 1 million homes by early 2018.

MKOPA solar is an award-winning company with big plans, a big market, and a big future. It is a pretty good bet that 18th century technologist Dr. Benjamin Franklin would approve of MKOPA’s business model and activities, and acknowledge that the company, like Franklin himself, had found a way to “do well by doing good.”

Photos: All photos courtesy of MKOPA

MKOPA website