Nigerian Off-Grid Market Programme (NoMAP) as part of efforts to remove bottlenecks hindering energy access to households in communities have successfully integrated five leading Solar Home Systems companies: Azuri Technologies, A Solar, Oolu Solar, Smarter Grid International (SGI) and Sosai Renewable Energy Company into SWIFTA’s 20,000 strong cash collection agent network.
The recent integration follows a rigorous User Acceptance Test (UAT) initiated and financed by Nigerian Off-Grid Market Programme which would ease subscription collection from unbanked Pay As You Go (PAYGO) customers of the companies.
The six-week integration was financed and project-managed by The Nigeria Off-grid Market Acceleration Programme (NoMAP), a market building programme jointly supported by the Shell Foundation and USAID that aims to, amongst other things, address the current difficulties faced by Solar Home Systems (SHS) companies in collecting payment from unbanked customers.
Adedotun Eyinade, Programme manager, NoMAP while announcing this partnership in Lagos observed that customers who are unbanked and living off the grid often face the arduous task of not being able to access Pay As You Go Solar since there are limited options to pay for their monthly subscriptions
Eyinade said that with the integration into Swifta agent’s network, PAYGO customers can now seamlessly pay for their monthly subscription through cash collection agents
According to him, “NoMAP views the pilot as a workaround to address the challenges associated with Nigeria’s low mobile money uptake which makes it difficult for unbanked customers to pay for Solar unlike their peers in East Africa”.
Adedotun further said it is hoped that these five companies that we have partnered on the integration will be able to expand into new off-grid communities since collection risk will be addressed by this integration.
“NoMAP will collect and report evidence of improvement in sales, churn, default rate, customer experience and energy access to the unserved”, he said.
The system is designed such that, a PAYGO customer from any of the five companies with a subscription plan can renew its subscription through SWIFTA’s mobile or static agents leveraging on the company’s proprietary OMNIBRANCH platform.
KELECHI EWUZIE
