BUSINESS
Platinum Jubilee
When doing good is good business Can you do me a favour? Take your mobile phone, laptop, and wifi router, put them in the car and drive them to a field. Now dump them on the grass and tell me, how are you going to power them now? How are you going to run your business if you can’t find a power source? Who are you going to call when your ability to pay the bills is threatened assuming your phone isn’t dead too? By Kate Bendix
If you live in Africa, you call Africa Power and ask to speak to its founder, MDHUB member Dr Alastair Livesey and he will tailor-make an electricity system bespoke to you. I kid you not. Africa Power was set up ten years ago to provide “African solutions to African problems”. In this instance how do you run a household or small business and make money without electricity? You can’t afford to buy the infrastructure and there is no Western-style power grid. It’s impossible to grow crops for the market if you can’t irrigate them, power your clippers if you’re a barber or charge your phone without power. So you stay poor, and underfed and your prospects remain diminished. Alastair says “Africans aren’t interested in tapping into a power network, most of them wouldn’t have the equipment to make use of it. They want the services electricity can supply; irrigation, refrigeration, and something so simple – phone charging. Women want to recharge their torches so they can see where they’re stepping in the dark and fishermen want
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to haul in their catch without drowning. They want a useful, mobile outcome. “So, we lease them that outcome, a renewable energy source and the necessary tools to go with it.”
Africa Power leases ❛❛ me a Business in a Box
which includes solar power, storage batteries, power sockets, lights and a fridge ❜❜
Alastair and his team developed the Business in a Box aimed at microbusinesses, smallholders, and store owners, for example, and it is, in my humble opinion, downright genius. It works thusly. Say I want to sell locally produced milk, fish and meat, cold drinks to thirsty customers and rent out my electrical socket to power hungry mobile phone users. There’s only one snag, I don’t have electricity. Africa Power leases me a Business in a Box which includes solar power, storage batteries, power sockets, lights and a fridge.
