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Heard of Hand-Cranked Radio? Get Ready For Pedal Powered Electricity
In large swaths of Africa and Asia, when darkness comes, life returns to what it has been for centuries – confined and at the mercy of the elements. Two billion people still live this way. But thanks to innovative entrepreneurs working Lighting Africa, a joint IFC and World Bank program, a bit more light is being brought to those living in darkness on the continent.
Nuru Light, a company supported by Lighting Africa, has devised a simple way of generating power – through pedaling a machine that looks like a stationary bicycle.
Customers who purchase a Nuru Light for $4-6 charge it weekly at their local shop, where the retailer will charge them around $0.20 for 20 minutes of gentle pedaling. This is enough for a full charge and approximately 28 hours of quality light.
These technology and business model open new avenues for Lighting Africa to make quality, affordable light accessible to low income households and small and medium enterprises in Africa.
The Nuru Light System was designed specifically for low income people living in rural Africa. Nuru spent a year in the field in Rwanda, surveying over 600 households most of whom were using kerosene for lighting. The company discovered that over 90% of their potential customers work in agriculture, earn less than $2 a day and are unable to meet the upfront costs of renewable energy products.
Nuru then developed a low up-front cost product, requiring small recurring payments for charging, a business model similar to charging cell phones with airtime. Consumers who would have previously spent around $0.20 a day on dangerous, polluting and expensive kerosene can now recoup the cost of a $4-6 lamp and its weekly charging in four to five weeks.
Cost was not the only factor that Nuru took into account when developing the light system : consumers preferences also informed the design. Each LED light can be used individually in a variety of ways, such as a headlamp, worn around the neck, hung from the ceiling, resting on a flat surface of bottle mounted, or can be combined with other Nuru LED units. As many of Lighting Africa supported products, the Nuru Light System can also be used to charge a cell phone, and even a radio.
This new technology for clean off-grid lighting also requires a different business model from the solar lanterns that Lighting Africa is supporting. Consumers do not charge the Nuru Light themselves at home (as they might with solar charged lamps), but instead customers go to a local retailer to recharge their lights.
In this business model, Nuru is distributing its lamps through a network of village level entrepreneurs who operate microfranchises. These entrepreneurs sell the lamps and recharge them, using the Nuru POWERCycle. Nuru recruits these entrepreneurs from local cooperatives and trains them in using the POWERCycle, then provides them with a loan of the lights from one of their microfinance partners.
The Nuru Light is already in use in several districts of Rwanda; it is coming soon to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
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