Energy Catalyst - Upya
Transcript 7-minute video:
Access to clean energy is the first step of development. The problem is that it produces a lot of smoke and it's expensive to buy fuel every day.
To be honest, it's a challenge for the kids to study because they're affected by the smoke. There are 840 million people without electricity worldwide and there are many companies and organisations working to address this issue.
Those companies, those 4,000 plus companies, those are our customers. We are trying to help them to reach more people. Upya's mission is to help small to medium-sized distributors in Africa. So we provide software that enables them to reach more customers.
We are developing innovative software alongside our partner Givewatts to try and reach people who are a little bit lower to the bottom of the pyramid. That’s a very large group of people who currently are not able to start their journey on the energy ladder because they are not able to pay for the deposit to get into a Pay-Go contract. And that’s the problem that we are really trying to address with this Energy Catalyst project in particular. But these days are tough. We deny ourselves and when we do that.
Rather than having products where there is a large upfront deposit we try and make that deposit smaller.
From a software perspective we do a thing called ‘grouping.’ If you want to offer a product with a much lower deposit to one customer, that’s increasing the risk profile for Givewatts, the last mile distributors. So we have to counteract that. From the distributor perspective, from Givewatts, they define what they want their risk profile to be and our software just automatically balances that for them.
When it comes to the Upya software I’m happy about it, the first thing. I’m able to reach a lot of customers especially in rural areas. I can see that they are paying and even telling their friends about the product because they are happy about it anyway. For a customer to trust you it’s good for you at least to be updating them. Whenever they pay, it’s good to be telling them, "Your balance is this." So that they can prepare themselves to pay. For many years we didn’t have such a thing. We are giving them a good future and a bright future. So it’s very easy for us to think "Well, they go into rural areas and they sell the products." But the reality of it is much, much more complicated. And it’s notoriously difficult in rural Africa to collect data of high quality. Our software has data collection functionality that enables Givewatts to know more about who their customers are, which means when they report they don’t need to use industry average. They can use real numbers of real people because they have gotten that data.
Anyone who is going to invest in this industry will need to see that there is a real solid framework in place to see what impact they are having. Upya provides that. Energy Catalyst has been transformational for Upya over the past number of years. Partnerships are critical for what we do. Upya brings the technical expertise and innovative software to the table and Givewatts brings years of market experience and know-how. I would say that Energy Catalyst facilitated that initial meeting with Givewatts and it’s going very well.
Energy Catalyst has been critical to that whole relationship.
We know that so far there has been 5 tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided. We know the number of hours of light available has increased by 95%.
We know these families are going to save a total of around £50,000 over the product cycle. We know their children can now study 50% more than they used to before. And we know from the surveys that Givewatts does that, some of the money they save goes towards school fees for instance. The companies we work with have complex businesses and we are trying to support them to grow sustainably. We are in operation in more than twenty countries across Africa and Asia and that’s something that’s very motivating for us as a team.
The solar really helps us. I can do business even at night. I can make extra money by charging my customers' phones and radios. That keeps me moving forward in life. The solar doesn't have any smoke and the kids can study at night without challenges.
I see positive change in my life and my family is thriving.
END
#EnergyCatalyst #CleanEnergy #Africa #SolarPower
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