Simon Bransfield-Garth is the current CEO of Azuri Technologies, a business that combines the latest solar innovation with mobile payment technology to bring affordable, clean energy to the 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa that have no access to reliable electricity. In this interview with DIPO OLADEHINDE, Bransfield-Garth explains how he has developed Azuri Technologies into a major pay-as-you-go off-grid solar home solutions provider with a vast network of agents and distributors across sub-Saharan Africa.
How has Azuri Technologies leveraged its platform to deepen its roots in Nigeria’s solar market?
Azuri is providing solar home systems across sub-Saharan Africa, enabling households that do not have the grid at all or have a very intermittent grid to be power normal household devices like television, a radio, and charge phone.
The main problem with solar power is that you have to buy a piece of equipment upfront and this is very expensive. So Azuri tries to provide solar on what we call Pay As You Go, where we put the equipment in your house for a small amount of money and then you pay a small fee every week in order to be able to use the system. You are able to benefit that without having to purchase the equipment with a large amount of money upfront. Then you pay this fee for two and half years for the system to become yours and you will no longer have to pay anymore. You have free TV, free lighting, free power for other things. Most of the customers of the system are people who either have no grid or have an intermittent grid and are spending a lot of money already on diesel in order to be able to power their houses.
What role do you see solar playing in Nigeria’s economic development?
I think solar has a really exciting potential within Nigeria, we all know that Nigeria has challenges with power. So there are roughly 50 percent of households that don’t have power at all and all those households that have power only have for a certain period during the day. One of the things you can rely on is that the sun is going to rise day in day out. So there is no question of whether that is going to happen and solar power enables people to have electricity every single day absolutely guaranteed. But, there are some devices that solar power can’t power. It is difficult to use solar to power a kettle or iron, but there are many devices that solar can power like TV, radio, lightings, and fridges among other devices used on a daily basis. So we can use solar as that mechanism that sits alongside the main of electricity and enables one to get free access to power and your basic goods and households and then if you need the grid in order to be able to power high powered devices, then that would be a personal choice for the individual households.
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Is Nigeria ready for solar deployment?
Interestingly, solar power has really taken off in East Africa and historically Nigeria has been slower to adopt solar power than East Africa. What we see now is solar being used in a big way in Nigeria replacing bigger systems, replacing larger TV, or fridges and other devices which in East Africa is not been used for. We really think that Nigeria is ripe on the edge if adopting solar power in a really big way.
What is the major challenge facing solar energy in Nigeria?
Solar penetration in Nigeria today is just less than one percent of households. If you look at East Africa it is becoming much larger. These are the countries that have more than 10 percent of households with solar power and the number is growing quite fast. So, we think Nigeria is at the point where there is a big market but hasn’t been really served until now and the time is now to be able to get the individual households.
How did you come about pay-as-you-go system?
The pay-as-you-go essentially originated from mobile phones technology. So, if you remember the early days of mobile phones, then you have to have a contract and very few people could afford it. As a result, mobile carriers came up with the idea of pay as you go which enables people to access mobile phones affordably, and that was really what made mobile phones become a mass-market product that everybody can access. Solar is essentially the same thing. But people still spend a lot of money on the alternative to solar power. So whether that is petrol in your generator, or kerosene in your lights, candle, whatever it may be, people are spending a great deal of money. Currently in Nigeria, we are able to offer a TV and a fan for less than the cost that people are spending on petrol. So as far as the customers are concerned, it is cheaper to have solar power.
Do you think low-income earners will accept this pay-as-you-go considering the level of poverty?
I will draw on the experience of what has happened in other countries. So pay-as-you-go is found in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. It is particularly strong in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, a whole range of other countries. Nigeria historically has not had pay-as-you-go partly because mobile money technology has not taken off in Nigeria which is not the case in other countries. But we think Nigeria is absolutely ripe now to be able to adopt a pay-as-you-go.
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What has been your experience in Nigeria?
Our experience has been great. I was out in Ogbomosho talking to customers who had TV and other solar appliances and what they all tell me is how pleased as they are able to turn their generator set off so they don’t have a generator running at night, running for much of the day, and can get rid of the fumes and other things associated with generating set. Now, that does not mean people get rid of their generating set. They still might use it for few hours a day to run a freezer, for example, and for other devices but what it does mean is that people don’t have to run their generating set 24 hours. They can run for a much shorter period of time and instead use solar to power these devices.
Despite rising demand, power generation has remained low. What would you say is the major challenge in the energy value chain?
There are a lot of challenges in energy everywhere. Clearly, there are some technical things that need to be addressed with the structure of energy. But also one of the big challenges is that the population continues to grow at a rapid rate. Even if energy is provided more quickly, very often the population growth is outstripping the growth of energy delivery. But also delivery energy in a conventional way works really well if you are in an urban center and much more difficult if you are in a rural area. The cost of wiring up a customer who is 10 kilometers from the nearest road is really very high whereas solar systems don’t require any infrastructure. You literally go to the house, install it in that house and it is done. So there is a large number of customers that are much better served by stand-alone solar. There are customers who have the grid and there are customers in the middle where they have grid but the grid is not reliable enough. They want solar as a backup or as an alternative to being able to get reliable power for household devices.
Azuri has embarked on different partnerships; how have these been able to boost financial inclusion in Nigeria?
In order to roll out this sort of technology, it is key to have partnerships. We have partnerships with many organizations within Nigeria. Early on this year, we announced a partnership with First Bank and one of the key challenges we have with pay-as-you-go is the ability of customers to be able to pay on a regular basis. So, we have partnerships with First Bank, First Monie, mobile platforms which enable our customers to be able to pay very easily for the system that they have got. Other customers are using other techniques while people are paying directly to bank accounts.
How will the partnership with Marubeni assist your quest?
So Marubeni is a Japanese corporation a future 500 corporation in the world. It has huge experience of rolling out big generation power but Azuri and Marubeni have a shared vision the future of energy doesn’t look like it’s past and so our partnership with Marubeni enables us to scale out our solar power more quickly than will otherwise do without that partnership. So we are committed with working with Marubeni to support the rapid roll-out of solar particularly in Nigeria and bring the technology to the thousands of households
What advantages will Nigeria get from Azuri solar system?
So first, it is reliable power, every night you are going to have light; every night you are going to be watching your TV. Reliability is number one. Number two is that you are able to get rid of a generating set for a large part of the day. You get rid of the noise, fumes and the cost of having a running. The third one is that with Azuri, you are able to get free energy. With Azuri, the solar home system you pay for two and a half years, once you pay for that system you no longer have to pay for it anymore. So we estimate that already ten million consumers in sub-Saharan Africa have free energy from pay-as-you-go solar home system and in the first half of this year, a million new systems were sold. So that’s enough system to supply another five million consumers. The rate of roll-out of the system is growing very fast. And it is really very exciting because everywhere else in the world, people pay for their energy and potentially the Nigeria consumer could be one of the first consumers who are able to get free energy and be able to use that energy for a whole lot of things.
