A field visit to Nakuru, Kenya, one of the proposed sites of new Ecotact pay-per-user ‘Ikotoilets’.

I vividly recall growing up in a rural part of Central Kenya, a thin shy boy (an undoing which I’ve been trying to shake all these years!) and waking every morning before the break of dawn and walking barefoot several kilometers to school. At Kianjeneni Primary School, we scooped out drinking water with our jerricans from Karia, a small dam which we shared with a diesel powered generator pumping water to a neighboring coffee milling factory. We did this in earnest, oblivious of the effects of the consumption of untreated and contaminated water. My weekends were spent either grazing my father’s cow or tilling the land and we would be rewarded with bumper harvests safely tucked away in the granaries.

The farming methods and inputs employed were localized, for example maize, beans and other crops from previous harvests were used as seeds for the new season, and the use of organic ferilizer (made by heaping several layers of maize stalks and other farm material and sandwiched by wood ash). Our energy sources came from paraffin and firewood, which was scarce even then. Today societies have been transformed as technology improves, easing communication. However, life is tougher today due to low food security which is traceable to reduced crop yields because of the vagaries of the weather, land overuse and inaccessibility of inputs that lead to higher rates of rural-urban migration.

I have been working at the East Africa office mapping out the energy sector- solar BoP distribution and biogas as well as conducting business plan reviews, financial analysis of projections and performing desktop research as part of the initial deal filter process. A large untapped market of renewable energy (RE) still exists, but most initiatives are driven by misconceptions about the BoP consumer.

A clear understanding is needed: how do you integrate your branding campaign with the nature of this consumer segment? For example, you cannot sell on the premise of pollution or environmental concerns. My upcountry neighbor, Mama Jerotich, cares little about the smoke that has been billowing from her roof for years and its effects on her health. The approach of suggesting substituting your routine energy needs (kerosene, firewood) with a one-off investment in biogas or solar LED light will not increase the uptake.

Opportunities do exist around  building a well-funded marketing campaign that will be a success with the locals (e.g. liaising with agriculture extension officers during field visits) and selling the goods as aspirational – an understanding from the end user’s perspective. However, there exist lots of challenges with some RE technologies. After visiting farmers who have installed biogas and analyzing their profile, it is quite clear to me that biogas, even with an embedded subsidy component and ready financing, is hard to scale up and is a product for the middle income segment.

A recent interesting article argues that thriving clean energy ventures are driven by more than lust for profit. I have met very few entrepreneurs who have been bitten by the social entrepreneurial bug. I had an opportunity to interact with Skylink Innovators (winner of the Ashden Awards and Bid Network Business Plan Competition). The tenacity and determination of Agnes, a director, complements very well the technical engineer Kinoti. It was amazing to hear their many innovative ideas including firing bricks using rice husks which would employ thousands of jobless young people. They have in place a staggered paying system on installations. In three years, they have managed to install over 200 biogas plants, most of them in households, which is no mean feat. The biggest challenge is to arouse more of these entrepreneurs, who are ready to follow that narrow path – trading off higher margins for greater humanity impact. This path is closer to a calling.

Martin Theuri is an MBA student at the University of Nairobi’s School of Business. While not in class, he also runs a start-up consulting firm proffering financial solutions to SMEs and NGOs. Prior to that, he was a Research and Corporate Analyst at NIC Capital Investment Bank.