IXL Social Enterprise Case Studies Energy January 2012 | Página 3

Revolutionizing the way to make energy affordable for everyone

SunnyMoney wants to transform lighting
in Africa
At night, the plains of western Tanzania are not
just quiet; they’re dark, too. The light of the stars
and the moon faintly illuminates a vast grassland
that is home to almost one million people.1 By
day, they work in fields and villages as farmers,
laborers, traders, and professionals. They
study in schools, raise children, manage small
businesses, and tend livestock. After sunset,
however, the lively activities that occupy these
rural communities wind down quickly. For most
people here, beyond the reach of Tanzania’s
sparse and unreliable electric grid, evening
activities are lit by kerosene lamps, candles, or
fire. Every household likely has access to these
lights, but because of the high cost of fuel most
families extinguish them early or leave them
unlit. At night, few people are working and even
fewer students are studying.
With the successful model of mobile phone
penetration as an inspiration, Jeremy Leggett and
the management team of SunnyMoney, a social
enterprise, are convinced they can bring better
and less expensive light to rural Tanzania and
other communities across Africa. Their business
is distributing stand-alone solar lamps.
Leggett and his team are confident that a

relatively sophisticated product can reach even
the world’s most remote corners. Mobile phones,
for example, became nearly universal in little
more than a decade, in many regions leapfrogging
the step of installing copper wire, the traditional
telecommunications infrastructure, and are
now more numerous than toilets in some of the
world’s poorest countries.2
Bringing cheap, safe and sustainable solar light
to communities throughout Africa is a huge
challenge, and SunnyMoney has committed itself
to the bold goal of eliminating kerosene lamps
from Africa by 2020. But SunnyMoney neither
expects nor intends to be able to reach every
potential consumer itself. Instead, it sees itself
as the catalyst for change, expanding its impact
by educating consumers and creating distribution
channels so that other solar lighting enterprises
might scale and prosper at the same time.
How can SunnyMoney get affordable, renewable
sources of artificial power and light to everyone
in Africa by the end of the decade? Can
access to light scale up as quickly as access to
mobile phones has? What can be learned from
approaches taken by would-be competitors, other
industries and other organizations?

Millions of people in Africa could benefit
from better lighting solutions
Lighting is fundamental. Any community with
fuel for a fire has the power to light the night
and has access to the social, educational, and
economic benefits of an extended day.
But an open fire is a poor source of light. To
maximize the benefits of lighting, a light source
needs to be safe, reliable, convenient, bright
enough for the task at hand, easy to acquire and
to fuel, and—most importantly—inexpensive to
operate.
Light bulbs powered by the electrical grid meet
these standards for billions of people around
the world. Reliable access to the grid, kerosene
lanterns, candles, battery-powered flashlights and
other stand-alone sources of light perform well
on one or more of those dimensions, but leave
room for improvement in others.

In Africa, where the reach of the electrical
grid is still very limited, the opportunity for
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