Our yard outside the “little house”

Our blogging was put on hold after Lesley and Tori’s laptops were stolen at the end of May! Needless to say, after the robbery our computer time was much more limited. But despite that setback, our pilot came to a very successful conclusion. Lesley and Tori took a whirlwind tour of Nairobi in early June (while Ando kept things in order in Musoma), which included several trips to the very impressive iHub as well as attendance at Pivot East where Mbwana officially announced the launch of the Savannah Fund. Congratulations to him and his partners Paul Bragiel and Erik Hersman for an incredibly timely and important venture. Then we

Kingwendu – we’ll miss you!

wrapped up loose ends and said goodbye to our customers, our “little house” and our faithful companions Kingwendu and Darul – it was hard to believe time had passed so quickly.

We are now using everything we learned during our incredible experience in Musoma and Mwikoko to optimize our Pay-As-You-Go-enabled SoLite-2 as we move quickly towards our upcoming commercial launch. Repayment from our Mwikoko customers is 100% to date, which is extremely encouraging and speaks to the value that our customers place on clean energy access. Keep posted for updates on our progress over the exciting months ahead.

(Credit to Ando Shah for his stunning photographs)

Benedetha with her SoLite

Over the past week we had a chance to get to know our customers a bit better, including learning about what they do for a living. Their occupations have turned out to be very interesting…and sometimes possibly a little lost in translation. For example, the three of us spent quite a few conversations speculating what type of meat was always drying in the sun at the home of the stunning Benedetha. It turns out that her family harvests the swim bladders of fish from Lake Victoria and sells them by the kilo to whole-sellers, who apparently use the material for plastics in plates, cups and electronic equipment? It was amazing to watch Benedetha and the eldest of her eight children very efficiently sorting, cutting and laying out the bladders. The mystery of the meat is solved, but we’re still a little unsure how the rest of the process works!

Crispianos, the brick-maker

We learned that another customer, Shadrack, specializes in selling religious books in Kenya and Uganda. Apparently there are some special types of religious texts (a Roman Catholic hymn book was an example we were given) that are produced only in Tanzania, but are used throughout East Africa. When Shadrack determines that there is sufficient demand for the books to merit a trip, he takes them by bus to his clients. This religious-focused occupation seemed very fitting given that we had learned his name (spelled Shadrach) originates in an Old Testament proverb about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who were known for their exclusive devotion to God (thanks to linguist extraordinaire Dr. Jessica Rett for this vignette).

Three other customers that we spoke with had slightly more conventional occupations. The photogenic Stefano (pictured in the previous post) is a farmer, and rotates through many

Lucia

different crops including maize, rice, watermelon, carrots, tomatoes and Chinese cabbage. He sells primarily to wholesalers, who come directly to his land to pick their purchases. According to him, rice is “the kicker” (as our translator Justin put it) in terms of profitability, and is currently in season. Crispianos molds concrete into bricks for new homes in Mwikoko and surrounding villages. He says the use of large concrete blocks has increased a lot during the last 3-4 years because they are much more “efficient” than earthenware blocks, which require many more rows to reach the same height. Finally, the lovely Lucia owns a small video shop along the main road in Mwikoko that she lights with the SoLite every night between 7-9 pm. We visited her one evening to see the light in use!

Lucia's shop lit by the SoLite

Although their income sources are diverse, for all these customers (besides perhaps Lucia) the influx of money is somewhat inconsistent and difficult to predict, depending on current demand for their particular product or service. This may be the reason they are attracted to our pay-as-you-go pricing, which lets them to pay for energy over time in the quantity of their choice. This pricing system fits their cash flow and is therefore affordable, rather than requiring a large, possibly prohibitive, upfront payment.

We’re looking forward to continuing to learn more about the lives of our customers in the coming week!

Stefano with his SoLite

Our first week of sales has been exhausting, but we’ve learned so much. While we’ve been educating our customers on how to use their units, they’ve been teaching us how to better design our product and how to efficiently convey the concept of pay-as-you-go solar. To communicate the idea of pay-per-use energy we’ve learned to refer to LUKU, which is the keypad-based pre-paid metering program used by people on the grid in Tanzania. People love the idea of “LUKU binu TANESCO”, which means LUKU without the government-run Tanzanian Electric Supply Company (which apparently isn’t very popular…). A common point of confusion has been the difference between charging the unit’s battery, and paying for energy use. We’ve learned the value of the “simu” (phone) analogy: you have to keep your phone’s battery charged, but you also have to buy airtime in order to make a call. And, although luckily many of our customers are familiar with the concept of solar energy, we’ve been emphasizing the importance of keeping the panel in full sunlight for as many hours of the day as possible, which has led to some creative solutions!

We have been surprised and intrigued by some of the other questions and concerns of our customers. Mama Ngede

Our panel on top of a basket, on top of a tree!

wondered if the brightness of the light could harm her eyes, and we assured her that it was much better than a flickering kerosene lamp. Mama Mwajema asked if she could use the light while it was still wrapped in bubble-wrap because she was worried that insects would get stuck behind the lens. Stefano had been warned that charging with solar could damage his phone, so he was considering saving for a back-up battery just for use with our unit. He was also concerned about radiation from the light because it was an electronic device like his cell phone, and he had heard that cell phones emitted radioactivity.  We reassured him that the SoLite was safe for his phone, and his health! These experiences make us so grateful for this opportunity to interact directly with our customers, and use their feedback and insights to grow as a company.

The iPhoue

It’s been a busy weekend preparing for our first sales tomorrow. Our very patient “beta” testers, Justin of TanzSolar and Phabian of Juasun, have helped us find and troubleshoot some final bugs in the firmware. We’ve also been double-checking the reliability of our mobile-phone charging functionality for knock-off phones and batteries, which are extremely common here. Our favorite so far is the iPhoue!

We were excited to receive our first phone call from a potential customer, Shadrack, Saturday evening. Fortunately Lesley’s SIM was actually in her phone – we now have six SIM cards for the three of us, and we’re just starting to figure out a good system to keep them organized. Most Africans have at least two or three SIM cards, so it seems pretty ridiculous that we’re having so much trouble keeping track of them. Regardless, we spoke with Shadrack (with the help of Mbwana!), who is traveling next week and wanted to be sure that he could still purchase a unit. He is

Our eager customer, Shadrack, showing us his battery-powered lamps

transferring the upfront cost of the unit to a relative’s M-PESA account for the initial sale, and was double-checking that he could assume the “deni” (debt) on the unit and make subsequent pay-as-you-go payments through his M-PESA account when he returned. This was a great example of how remittances could be tapped for energy payments.

Overall, the last few weeks have been an amazing confirmation of the power of the mobile-mediated landscape in Africa. We’ve bought and registered multiple SIMs, set-up mobile-money accounts and transferred money to each other, purchased airtime with scratch cards and M-PESA, converted airtime into data via SMS (just text “bomba7” to 15300!), and checked airtime and data balances through SMS. This is all second nature to our African counterparts, and the fluidity and flexibility of the systems are an incredible comparison to our rigid two-year contracts in America.

Keep posted for news of our upcoming week of sales!

Lesley & Nshama on Lukuba

impressively thorough market segmentation for our product (according to the GSB-educated Mbwana) and wanted us to design a digital clock into the next generation of the SoLite, which was a first! It was a very interesting day and the village was ideal as a pilot target in many ways, but unfortunately the boat trip was a bit too long since we’re planning to pay daily visits to our customers. We arrived home to the news that our intrepid engineers, Ando and Bryan, had completed successful end-to-end testing of our technological integration with the African mobile network, which was fantastic news – we took a celebratory group picture with Bryan on Skype!

The team after our successful end-to-end, with Bryan on Skype

Yesterday we headed out to visit villages around the outskirts of Musoma. After visiting a few – including the mining village of Kigeri Tuma where we saw residents panning for gold – we ventured into the village of Mwikoko, which turned out to be just a few kilometers outside of Musoma. It’s a small, densely-populated off-grid village with high penetration of M-PESA, which makes it perfect for our pilot work. We met with the local village official, Salemani, who became

Our host, Salemani, and Patrick (Mr. Simu)

our host. With his help, we spoke with a very diverse group of potential customers, all of whom were incredibly hospitable and kind. While their specific energy needs differed, they all recognized the value of replacing kerosene use for lighting and accessing in-home mobile-phone charging. Mbwana nicknamed Patrick “Mr. Simu” (Mr. Phone) because he was very excited about being able to charge his phone “on the road”, since he moves around a lot for work. By

Stefano's family, Justin and Masatu from TanzSolar, and Tori and Lesley from Angaza

contrast, Stefano, a farmer, was most interested in converting to solar energy because kerosene was bad for his children. We asked him for a photograph with his family and we all ended up posing together. We’re heading back to Mwikoko during the rest of this week to continue customer interviews with the help of Salemani, before beginning to distribute units next week. We feel incredibly lucky to have found such a terrific place to work!

The team in the Serengeti

It’s been an exciting and very busy couple of days since we arrived in Dar! We met up with our adviser, Mbwana Alliy (a native Tanzanian) of i/o Ventures, who helped us find the best spots to buy some key supplies, and had a terrific dinner with the team from EGG Energy. Then Saturday morning we took an early flight to Mwanza in the northern region of Tanzania, on the edge of Lake Victoria. From there we hired a car to drive to Musoma where we’ll be piloting our pay-as-you-go technology over the next month in partnership with TanzSolar. It was a beautiful drive along the western edge of the Serengeti, and we got to stop for a picture at the edge of the park when our car overheated!

During the trip we were on the lookout for signs for the three dominant mobile-money providers in Tanzania to get a feeling for how much the service has penetrated the rural areas. We were amazed to see signs in nearly every village we passed – we nicknamed Bunda “mobile-money city” because almost every structure was posting signs for one or more of the

Ando hard at work in our little house in Musoma

mobile-money services. According to Mbwana, this is a massive change since just last year, both in terms of number and dispersion of mobile-money agents, and the ability of the average person to use the service. He thinks Tanzania is “catching up to Kenya really fast” in terms of mobile-money familiarity and use, which is terrific news for us since we’re integrating directly with Vodacom M-PESA during our pilot to streamline the acceptance of pay-as-you-go payments.

Bling M-PESA sign!

We arrived in Musoma mid-afternoon and settled into our “little house” in the lovely TanzSolar compound. We met our two very lovable resident dogs, and got to work getting everything up and running. Our TanzSolar hosts have been extremely helpful – Phabian introduced us to the town, and Robi and Paschal helped us plan out the logistics of our upcoming week of work in nearby villages. We kept up our exploration of mobile-money prevalence and were pretty impressed by this super cool M-PESA sign at one of the shops in town.

You may have heard any number of different names to describe the same general concept: How do you create products and services tailored specifically to meet the needs of extremely low-income or “base of the pyramid” users?

As a product designer, I’ve worked on a wide variety of projects, from medical devices like syringes to U.S. consumer electronics like the Amazon Kindle. However, in my experience, the most difficult type of design I have been involved with is the design of solar energy systems for sub-Saharan Africa. Design for the developing world is subject to an entirely new set of constraints not present in other design projects. Every cent counts in the cost of goods. A product must be rugged, weatherproof, kid-proof, and yes, even cow-proof. The product’s features must be determined through very careful user research and testing because adding superfluous capabilities means also adding unnecessary costs. A product must look, feel, and be high-quality to earn a customer’s trust, as making any purchase is a significant decision when resources are limited. When shipping to remote villages in Africa, every ounce of weight adds cost. Careful attention must be paid to every component in the product to minimize environmental impact, because, in these markets, nothing is recycled or disposed of properly. The list goes on…but hopefully you get the idea.

In the midst of all the design challenges of frugal innovation that I’ve touched upon above, I want to emphasize an important (and often overlooked) point. Frugal innovation and designing for extreme affordability does NOT simply mean a designer should create the cheapest product they can, with blind adherence to the lowest possible cost of production, in order to sell to those living off less than $2/day. Let me use Angaza’s story as an example:

Our team started the design process where every designer should start: developing empathy for our users and immersing ourselves in their lives, their villages, and their cultures. We set off with a clear goal to eradicate energy poverty through lighting and charging solutions for off-grid families and small businesses. Through observation, interviews, homestays, and prototype testing we sought to understand how these families use kerosene lanterns, how they keep in touch with relatives via mobile phone, what electronics they value the most, and how they spend and track their income, amongst other things. It quickly became clear that, although LED flashlights and solar desk lamps were a large upgrade from kerosene, customers were still not satisfied with these low price point solutions compared to the large multi-use solar home systems they were familiar with. They want to light multiple rooms in their home, charge multiple cell phones, put a security light over their front door, and have a light that is bright enough to read by, yet disperse enough to be shared by multiple people. But in order to design a product that fit these needs and desires, we were looking at a retail cost of >$100, well out of the financial reach of most rural households.

So we were faced with a challenge: customer need demanded more expensive products, yet financial practicality demanded cheaper ones. As a designer, how do you reconcile the two extremes? We took a step back and realized that the answer did not lie in iterating on the solar home system itself, but instead, in innovating on the financing method the customer used to purchase the product. Out of this process emerged our Pay-As-You-Go technology. Embedded completely within our solar products, this technology enables Angaza to deliver high-quality – and more expensive – energy solutions by accepting weekly micro-payments from customers and regulating the energy output of the unit based on their pre-paid amount. Regulated via the cellular network, our technology is redefining the way rural, off-grid customers purchase high-quality, high-performance renewable energy solutions – in small bits over time until eventual ownership. And, they are still paying less than they used to for kerosene!

In short, don’t fall prey to the common assumption that frugal innovation connotes the design of only low-cost products. Instead, it describes the design of products or services inspired directly from developing world needs, and sometimes those needs demand more expensive implementations!

Rural villager in India dreams up multiple ways to use our SoLite: 1) Headlamp!

After a long hiatus from maintaining an updated blog (we’ve been busy, just not with our blog…), we’re back!

Please check back often as we plan to bring more stories, Angaza developments, photos, and exciting news to the forefront! Also, please Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter for even more regular notifications.

Here’s to a great 2012!

http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/09/13/smallb4.html

John, a local of King'ori, has built his own house lighting system by taking apart flashlights and has succeeded in completely eliminating kerosene from his life.

We entered John’s house expecting to ask him our quick survey questions and be on our way to our next survey subject, but after asking him the question “how much do you spend on kerosene per week?” and having his response be “nothing,” I knew he would not just be another data point on our village surveys.

John has completely eliminated kerosene from his life by building his own

Small LEDs taken from flashlights now light John's home at night.

household lighting system by taking out the LED guts of flashlights and wiring them up to 4 D batteries and a switch. He has mounted one LED ring on the ceiling in each of the three small rooms in his house and only has to change the batteries every 4 months. It was a truly impressive home-built lighting system and even more rewarding to see John’s excitement in showing it to us. He explained his plans to improve the system, which he had built 6 months ago, by switching to a car battery and brighter lights, and adding a switch to each room so he could individually control each light.  John has succeeded in cleanly lighting his home at night and eliminating expensive kerosene from his life, and from an engineering perspective, I was thoroughly humbled by his self-built home lighting system.

Julia, Godlisten's daughter, shows us her nightly routine of studying by kerosene lantern for two hours every night.

After dark, we returned to Godlisten’s house to pay another visit. This time, we wanted to see how his family and children used kerosene at night, after hearing them talk about it earlier. Julia, his young teenage daughter, who is a student in secondary school, eagerly showed us how she used kerosene to study. She always sits at the table in their entry room and reads her history, English, and biology notes from her hand-made notebooks.  She showed us where her siblings and neighbors sit with her every night, and explained that it was more difficult to study by their family’s flashlight because the light was too directed to illuminate her entire notebook.  Julia is the perfect example of our goal to make our lights bright enough to read by, disperse enough for multiple people to share it at once, and affordable enough so families like Godlisten’s can light their homes without depending on kerosene.