 Good morning everybody. This is Russell Sturm. I am going to be serving as the facilitator of this conversation today. You have reached the Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for Short webinar. It's part of the E4C's 2014 webinar series. And today we have what I find to be a fascinating subject. It's the area I work in. We at IFC, Russell Sturm, and the E4C webinar series have been working together with three leaders of the off-grid solar industry to put together a conversation about dynamics in the market today and key issues surrounding it. This is a collaboration of Garav Manchanda, who's the CEO of One Degree Solar, Dr. Harold Schutzeichel, founder and director of SunConnect EG, and Ned Tozen, who's the president and founder of Delight. I'm Russell Sturm. I lead IFC, the International Finance Corporation's Energy Access Work, and IFC is part of the World Bank Group. We're the part of the World Bank Group that invests in the private sector. So we share the World Bank's mission of eliminating poverty to improve people's lives, but the way we do it is through private sector development. So I'd like us to slide over to slide two if we can. So the conversation today reflects a key area of E4C's work because E4C is always looking to share insights and developments from a technological standpoint, from a business model standpoint that shaped the model, the market. Our presenters today are all pioneers in the off-grid solar sector. So I think we're blessed to have this crew together in one space, one virtual space, but at first I'd like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series generally. Yana Aranda and Mike Madeir of AFME, Holly Schneider-Brown and Steve Welch of IEEE, who they both work on developing and delivering this webinar series that we're a part of. So thank you guys for helping to put this thing together, for putting it together. So if anybody has any questions about the series itself, these are the people to go to, and they're always interested in future topics and ideas for future speakers. You can see the email address for them at the top of the Engineering for Change website, which is engineeringforchange.org. So I'm going to ask Yana, one of the organizers of the series, to talk a little bit about E4C and how the series fits into it. Yana? Thank you, Russell. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, depending where you're joining us from today. Before we move on to our presenters, we thought it would be a great idea to remind you about E4C and who we are. We are a global community of over 20,700 technically-minded members and more than 200,000 social media followers such as engineers, technologists, NGO representatives, both scientists and others who work together to solve critical humanitarian challenges faced by underserved communities around the world today. Some examples include access to potable water, awkward energy, which is the subject of today's webinar, effective healthcare, agriculture, sanitation, and other areas. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory, a field-tested solution, and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies such as ASME, IEEE, ASBE, GUI, and ASHRAE, as well as academic supporters such as MIT's ELAB, international development agencies like USAID, Engineers of the Board of USA, and practical action, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy, and it's free. Check out our website, engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. This free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field to bring innovative ideas and technologies to bear on the global development challenges. Information about upcoming installments in the series and archive videos of past presentations can be found on the E4C webinar's page. You can see the URL listed right here. Additionally, you can find our webinar videos on our YouTube channel, so we encourage you to check that out as well. If you're following us on Twitter today, I personally like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag at E4C webinars. It's listed here in the center inch. Our next webinar will be on August 19th at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time with Dr. Patrick Meyer, who is the Director of Social Innovation at QCRI, and a really recognized personality. Dr. Meyer will be speaking about humanitarians in the sky, how UAVs are changing disaster response. We believe that it's going to be a very interesting and exciting webinar, and encourage you all to register. Just check out the E4C webinars page for updates and registration right there. If you're already an E4C member, we will be sending you an invitation to the webinar directly. So I'm going to hand it over back to Russell now. Thank you, Yana. So there's just a little bit of a guidance here about how this is going to work today. A few housekeeping items around it. You know, I think what we want to do is go to the next slide if we can. Seven. Yes, there we go. Okay. So this is how we're navigating around this today. So you see slide seven in front of you. We've got a few functions here that you can move between. One of them is the group chat, which you see in the top left-hand corner. During the course of the webinar, you can use this to type in any sort of remarks you have and interact with your fellow attendees. Now, I understand there's over 400 people that have registered for this. I don't know how many are online, but if you would please go into the group chat and type your location. This gives us a sense of the community that's participating in this, and it allows folks to interact. There's 100 people now online. We expect others to join over the course of it. So if you would please go into the group chat sometime early in the presentation, ideally now, and identify your location. Additionally, you'll see there's a Q&A window where you can type questions that go directly to the presenters. So the group chat is among the participants broadly. The Q&A is the questions that I will be looking at to see which ones we can queue up, which ones we have time for that support the flow of the conversation after the formal presentation. And then there's a help widget that you can see, and that's if you have technical issues. And we've got several folks on board that are keeping an eye on this. I see so far we've got participants from Mexico, India, U.S., Canada so far, among others. So after the webinar, you'll also see if you're trying to get a certificate of completion to meet your professional development requirements and get credit for this. If you go to the top of the website for Engineering for Change, there's information there that I had to get credit for this after it's over. We're also going to join now by Germany, South Africa, and Tanzania. So finally on that page, if you would please go to the survey. I think we want to go back to seven for that. Thank you. The survey in the bottom right hand corner, this helps us all to figure out how better to communicate what worked, what didn't work, so that this series can get better and better, and the participants can learn and figure out better how to communicate our thoughts and our ideas. So I'm the moderator, Russell Sturm. I've mentioned that I lead IFC's energy access work. We focus on private sector solutions for economic development, and I've worked in the energy field for seemingly ever, about 30 years or more. Originally working in the U.S. market with energy efficiency, I have a recurrent theme throughout my career of how you mobilize financing to make investments happen, which makes sense on economic and development grounds. After running an energy services company in the United States, I started working internationally at the International Institute for Energy Conservation where I became the president for work there for seven years, and decided that the platform that would work best for me was IFC. It was a nice convergence of the ability to think about markets, mobilize resources, aggregate people. So I've had a career where I think a lot about how you accelerate uptake of new technology that has economic, environmental, developmental benefits, how you address barriers to uptake of advantageous technologies, and how you mobilize the capital needed to make good ideas happen. And that's the work I continue to do here at IFC. I have been engaged with the off-grid lighting sector and the solar sector for the last really in different ways, 15 years, but more directly with the development of the Lighting Africa program and now Lighting Global, Lighting Asia, which work I lead at IFC over the last six years, five years or so. In this work, I've come to know my fellow panelists as pioneers in the space. Ned Tozen, who has a background going back where he was thinking about media technology. He was thinking about how you take technology and develop products and expand markets using initially mobile content, working in developed markets. And when he went back to graduate school at Stanford in business, he started thinking more about how transformative such technologies can be in the developing world and how you bring the principles of business as a basis for scaling access to energy. I met Ned when he was in graduate school before Delight was just an idea in his head. And he became the co-founder and now president of Delight, which he founded with Sam Goldman ever since. Delight is the acknowledged undisputed leader of the off-grid lighting sector. And he will be talking not just about Delight, but also about the whole, can he be laying down a contextual framework for our conversation today? He's talking about the energy access challenge, the limitations of traditional grid-connected power for much of the developing world, and talking about how Delight has been able to generate, actually, a tremendous impact on fully commercial basis and the direction that he sees the industry and his company going in that context. He'll be followed in the conversation by Gaurav Lanchanda. Gaurav is the CEO of One Degree Solar, which has a different niche in the market. Gaurav comes at this from his work in Western Africa, working in the health sector. He was working at the Clinton Foundation, where in that context from the inside he was seeing the shackles of lack of energy access. On an economy, on people's lives, and the health impacts of it. And from starting from the basis of trying to figure out how to help his health sector clients and counterparts access the energy they need to keep vaccines cold, to light operating rooms, to function. What emerged from that was his ideas around One Degree Solar. And now, in a commercial basis, he is seeking to scale and deliver energy access through the proprietary technology and business model of One Degree Solar. Finally, we'll be joined by Harold Schutzeichel. Harold has been, I would say, a serial entrepreneur and innovator. He has deep background in the solar industry as one of the pioneers of the German solar sector, going back to 98 with SolarStrom. And now he is applying his ideology, his ethics, his business expertise, and his technical expertise to a trio of interlinked organizations, Solar Energy Foundation, Sun Transfer and Sun Connect, which operate across the spectrum of commercial for-profit, not-for-profit foundation as a way to leverage various pieces of the continuum to achieve energy access at the highest level. So we're honored to have these three experts with us, people that have put their own money on the line to live a dream of scaling up access for the 1.2, 1.3 billion people without access to basic energy services in the planet. And I will hand the modem and the mouse over to my friend, Ned Tosen from Delight. Great. Thanks so much, Russell, for the very generous introduction. And thanks to all of you for attending and participating. I'm really impressed by the turnout. It's really exciting to talk with all of you today about enabling energy access for people who are living off the grid. And as one of the founders of Delight, I've been working in this field for nearly 10 years now. And in that time, I've just seen a lot of very remarkable changes in this off-grid energy space. And I want to spend some time giving all of you a high-level overview of where I see the market going. And really what I see is an amazing opportunity to make universal energy access a reality within the next 10 to 20 years. Before I get into that, to give you a little bit of context of where I'm coming from, I want to provide a little bit of background about Delight and how we evolved as a company since we got started. And let me see if I can take the slide here. There we go. So what really initially inspired us to start Delight was this. We started the company with a passion to eliminate the kerosene lantern, which is still the primary source of light for well over a billion people in the world. In my business partner, Sam, lived in a village in Benin without electricity for four years, and he experienced firsthand what it's like to live with a kerosene lantern. It's dim, polluting, it's hazardous, and actually it's quite expensive. People can spend 10 or 15% of their income on kerosene for light. And this issue really came to a head for Sam when his neighbor sunk in a kerosene fire. And the boy survived, but he lay on a mat in pain, unable to walk for six months as his burns healed. It really just seemed an injustice to Sam that with innovations in solar and LED technology, with satellites in the sky, smartphones in people's pockets that nearly a fourth of the world's population would be still burning kerosene for light. So that's what inspired us to start D-Light, really with a goal to replace the kerosene lantern with solar-powered solutions that were affordable and could beat kerosene when put head-to-head in a competitive marketplace. And here's a picture of these same students studying with one of our solar lights. And this particular light costs less than $10, which is less than two months of kerosene costs. So as you can see from this picture, better lighting enables opportunities. We've sold the opportunity for students to study for more hours, the opportunity for families to save money by not having to buy kerosene every day, and the opportunity for people to have more productive hours in the day and to earn more income. We've sold over 6 million lights since we founded the company, and that has had dramatic impact on the quality of life for our customers. But we also found that as customers had the chance to experience the benefits of using quality solar lighting products, lighting was really just a first step, and they had a desire for much more. So we next came out with mobile phone charging solutions, and that was followed by small-scale solar home systems that could run multiple lights, charge phones, power devices like radios. And we're continuing to innovate up this energy access ladder to provide our customers with an experience closer and closer to what grid power can offer. And we believe that with the increasing market acceptance and market penetration of these smaller-scale solar lighting solutions, as well as the really amazing innovations and technology in solar and energy efficiency, the demand for more comprehensive and higher-power energy solutions is just going to continue to accelerate. We've also heard from other companies who are active in this space that the entry-level solar lanterns really spur adoption for the entire power system. And this is a quote from the COO of Off-Grid Electric, which is a market leader in the solar home systems space in East Africa where solar lanterns are starting to gain large-scale market penetration. And she says, we have found it much easier to penetrate markets where customers have already had a positive experience with solar products as they have already built trust in solar technology and there are much higher levels of demand. So it's going to be interesting to hear Gaurav and Harold's perspective on this as their companies focus on these solar systems products. Certainly from Delight's experience in the market, we've seen that the demand for these solar home systems and higher-power devices are very much driven by the demand created through the establishment of a market of these smaller-scale solutions. So at this point, I want to take a step back, not talk about Delight, but just step back and think about the awkward energy sector as a whole and share with you about why I believe that there's this amazing opportunity today to provide energy access for everybody through renewable, decentralized, and market-based solutions. And first of all, when we think about energy, what we've really come to conclude is that power is fundamental to the quality of human life. The greater a country's electricity consumption, the greater the well-being of its people. And we have some data to back this up. The Human Development Index is a widely used measure of well-being that includes life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living. And to start with, we take Norway on one end of the spectrum and Zambia on the other. And you can see on the X-axis, we've mapped electricity consumption per person per year. And on the other, we've measured the well-being using the HDI score. And as you start populating this with other countries and other data, some really interesting patterns start to emerge. And as you can see here, it really doesn't take much energy access to drive a significant change. When annual energy consumption rises from zero to just a few thousand kilowatt hours, basically enough power to run a few lights, charge mobile phones, run a radio, fan, or TV, you start to see huge gains in a person's quality of life. But the question arises, if the benefits are so obvious, why is it that so many people in 2014 live and work like this? And to answer this question, it's important to understand the underlying drivers and where is this demand supply gap for energy today, and where is it likely to be in the future? So on the demand side, there are two billion people that don't have access to reliable electricity. About half of that number have no electricity at all, and the other half are technically connected to the grid, but they just can't count on it when they need it. And experts say that we need to build nearly a thousand terawatt hours of generation capacity to supply power for the billion people who don't have an electric connection. And this doesn't even include the billion people who have an unreliable connection. It's important also to understand where the demand is concentrated. The fact is that 85% of the energy impoverished live in rural areas, and with population growth, migration to urban areas is really unlikely to change the number of underserved in rural areas. And really, people in rural locations, they have the same desire for the benefit of access to energy that their urban or peri-urban counterparts do, but their location means that they have to go to extremes to get power. They need to earn a living or study, but their only options are dangerous, expensive, and fundamentally unsustainable. Now, if we take a look at a global perspective of energy consumption, a historic shift has happened recently, where for the first time in modern history, developing countries have past developed countries, or OECD countries, in energy use. And it's not going to go back to the way it used to be either. This trend is actually just going to accelerate, as you can see in this graph here. So what is energy demand likely to look like in the future? Well, the planet is going to be home to more than 8 billion people within the next 15 years. OECD countries have the largest economies today, but non-OECD countries like China, India, and Nigeria, that's where the action is going to be in these energy markets. Now, what about the supply side? Universal energy access is really, it's not just a good intention, it's a global imperative. It's not if, but how do we create and deliver the roughly 1,000 terawatt hours of additional generating capacity or more that we need to build to meet the unmet demand. And to do that, we really should consider a wide range of approaches, including fossil fuels and including centralized power plants and grid distribution as means to combat energy poverty. So first, I just want to consider fossil fuels, which is the default energy resource. And fossil fuels have a lot to offer, kerosene, diesel, coal. These all have established distribution systems and a broad consumer base. 1,000 terawatt hours is equivalent of about 150 to 200 average size coal-fired power plants. And this is the approach China's taken. I actually lived there for several years, and I can tell you there's plenty of electricity, but the skylines look like this. So, if clean renewable energy is able to deliver access at a similar cost as fossil fuels, then these renewable resources should be prioritized as a key part of the solution to deliver energy access. And setting aside the fuel used for power generation, centralized power also requires transmission grids and distribution systems. Centralized generation and transmission grids are a great solution for high population density and short transmission distance markets. In fact, with 60% of people expected to live in a city by 2030, grids are an essential part of the future of energy for high-density areas. But the economics really don't work in these low-density, long-distance situations. Rural grid extension can cost $10,000 to $20,000 per kilometer, and losses can run 15 to 25%. So centralized power production, grid distribution, long-distance transmission, these are simply not cost-effective solutions for rural areas. And any practical solution to deliver energy access to these lower-density rural populations cost-effectively has to include smaller-scale generation and limited at any transmission. And what about customers? Do you like works with a lot of customers in these rural areas? And what are they telling us about what they want in terms of energy access? And what we hear from our customers in these rural areas is that they want to save money on energy. They don't like the solutions they're using today. They want quality solutions that they can trust, and they want control. They want control over their lives, and especially more control over their income and their expenses. So they really appreciate small-scale, reliable solutions that they can control. Our customers are savvy, they're demanding, and they're selective. They're willing to invest in energy, they're willing to invest in upgrading their energy, provided the products and services perform as promised. So we really see this massive problem of supplying this unmet energy demand as an incredible opportunity. The developing world is a blank slate to some degree. We're not stuck with a huge investment in infrastructure. And we don't have to try and scale solutions that we know don't work or that we know are environmentally unsustainable. The performance of solar power generation, energy storage, energy efficient appliances, all of these technologies are making huge strides while at the same time costs are declining. And we believe this is making universal energy access within our lifetimes possible for the first time. So we really believe that the world is facing a unique moment in history to deliver universal energy access and power for all. At the same time, the proliferation of affordable renewable technologies has created a viable marketplace for energy access products. Bases of pyramid customers have proven in large numbers that they can and they will pay market prices for modern power solutions that they can control. And we believe that by leveraging private enterprise and customer choice, we can leapfrog electrical grids and rapidly accelerate energy access for those living off the grid with affordable, renewable, and decentralized energy solutions. Thanks very much. With that, I'll turn it over to Gaurav from One Degree Solar. And apologies for the technical... I got rebooted. Hopefully, it didn't cause too much of a hassle for everybody. Thanks, Ned. That's great. And I'm impressed by how strange you were to talk about the D-Lite story to the extent that you could. And we appreciate sort of the foundational introduction to the story. And as you mentioned, Gaurav's One Degree Solar is occupying a space along with this energy ladder that is a bit up from your entry level products and in a sense is competing with the D-Lite products at the higher end, but it has a bit of a different business model. So, Gaurav, why don't you tell us a bit about One Degree and your view of the market at that level? Sure. Good morning, everybody. My name is Gaurav Manchanda. Russell, thank you for the kind introduction earlier and, Ned, for the overall context of, I think, energy poverty and energy access as a whole. And, to be honest, I would like to, of course, highlight what One Degree is doing, but really talk more about how the market is evolving and how companies like D-Lite, like One Degree and the others in the space are really also growing to meet the evolving needs of the market. So, I'll try to maintain restraint as well. So, this is a show a bit more about the context. I think what Ned was talking about with energy poverty really touches on the energy ladder that's in reference as well and taking a look at a standard energy ladder. We're talking about not only rural and peri-urban consumers, but also people in urban areas without reliable or electricity access. There are many people who are a bit easier to reach and closer to city centers that really we've experienced that you have blackouts for between three and five or even more nights per week, which represents a market opportunity. And also, I think when you're looking at the energy poverty issue and this ladder, it doesn't include public lighting and what people are using when they can't afford any electricity at home or any part of that ladder at all. And just to give a bit of background for how I got involved with the space, I just had, as Russell mentioned earlier, a number of years working for the Ministry of Health in Liberia so that at a time when Liberia's grid access was close to zero percent shortly after the war and I was responsible for leading the renewable energy initiatives for all of the off-grid clinics, which were virtually all of them at the time. So this was several years ago now and before LED lights were as efficient as they are, before solar panels were as efficient as they are today. And for that reason, and due to the application as well, we were looking to power centrifuges and microscopes and vacuum refrigerators and things that you would typically expect in remote and rural health clinics. For that reason, we were looking and forced to use a much larger system than you're looking at today. So this is an example of an insulation that was for vacuum refrigerators and a number of other equipment within the facility. And what it really came down to was, at least from the midwife and nurse perspective, the main use or the main benefit of this energy source was not for the refrigerators since supply chain for vaccines is also a challenge on its own, but it was for emergency lighting at night. So people who get in car accidents or emergency deliveries after dark, childbirth, for example, after dark, we essentially saw patients either buying kerosene or candles or fuel for the diesel generator, patients spending money out of pockets for those resources or the community health workers and midwives spending their own money. And it was just really causing some major negative implications on the sector. And one of the other, I think Ned showed a nice paved road in the rural area earlier, but when those roads get wet, they turn into bits. And this is representing another challenge of the larger systems. It is much harder to distribute. It requires very advanced insulation and maintenance and spare parts and a lot of other factors that go into the much larger systems to the point where in response to the feedback from the nurses, we were looking into much more portable solutions and that was the original reasoning for starting one degree was to look into more portable solutions that could provide basic lighting and full-encharging for health care workers. And this was, I'll wait for that slide to load, and this was back at a time when, and bringing in the overall market as a whole, I think this is kind of a before and after view of how products have evolved and how the market has evolved as well, where back in 2005, 2007, and several years ago, even the lanterns themselves were much larger, much less efficient. They were actually a bit costlier as well and also a single feature. So it was primarily in the top left, these older lanterns only for basic lighting, basic quality lighting. And we're seeing as the companies in the space continue to grow that these products are becoming more efficient, much cheaper, and much easier to distribute. And more importantly, or as importantly, I think require very little maintenance. And as time has gone on, I think as that was touching on earlier, we've, I think we've all noticed an evolution in consumer demand as well. So while these sort of solutions do certainly address the energy property issue, particularly with lighting, what we've heard throughout the years and what we've heard from those nurses and midwives, for example, in our initial projects years ago, is that they were very happy with the lighting solution and they could do their job easier. But when they brought the product home, their neighbors, the school teachers, or the shop owners, or anyone else in the community started asking for where they could buy the product. And when we started asking why they wanted to buy a basic lighting solution, we started hearing questions about, can this basic lantern also power a television? And I think we're all here, everyone in the industry now, is really looking kind of up the ladder a bit more to what can power these solutions. And regarding demand generation, it's really a matter of making these products aspirational. And aspiration in a lot of these communities typically means it's associated with status and status is associated with television. So even if the financing has been available to buy the TV, just having a power source that can power the TV is just a hire. So this is, as Russell mentioned, and I'll just skip over this quickly, but we did start by focusing on the healthcare sector and public sector exclusively. And as the nurses kept telling us there was demand elsewhere, not just for healthcare applications, but for larger systems that could be a bit more multi-functional. So we looked with our first flagship products to create what we call a PICO, a microsolar home system, which is multi-function in nature. So it powers anything from a basic phone to smart phones and tablets, locally available radios, and even a low-powered 12-volt television. And thinking of a culture like this, I'm showing how, in this picture, how the light bulb looks. And this has been a big demand driver for us particularly in Kenya where a lot of the feedback that we're getting in rural areas is that the lights are extremely bright and look just like what their cousins have in the city. And I highlight that because it does show that there is aspiration and there is demand to be on-grid and to live like the wealthier folks do in more urban, higher-income areas. And regarding that population, so this is a slide with data from Boston Consulting Group and over 10,000 surveys across Africa or interviews across Africa. And I want to point out or highlight that customer group a bit more and what they're looking to spend their money on. And if we can really break it down, it's consumer devices where the mobile electronics, the home appliances, and electronics for the home are all things that are really in demand. This is not only within the energy access scheme or realm, but really just as consumer demand grows and as the middle class grows, that demand does trickle down as well. And more importantly, these are the three mobile home appliances and electronics are all categories that we can actually power with the systems that are coming onto the market at this time. And the industry has certainly kept up, I think, kept up and helped to generate the demand as well where looking back to the era of the vintage lanterns that I was showing on a previous slide, the solutions that are on the market, it's, I think, been a chicken and egg situation, but as LEDs have become more efficient and the power, terrain, and power requirements have come down substantially, the industry manufacturers have been able to innovate and create new products at a lower cost. And what we've seen, I think, in the last 15 or 20 years is where customers essentially feel that the very apperageable products are within reach and looking just, skipping over some of these steps, but I think a lot of us remember days when solar lanterns were only provided through NGO donations or through donor agencies and things of that nature, and a handful of importers and ex-porters got involved, primarily selling lower-cost, lower-quality lanterns with very limited end-user contact and very limited warranty service or after-sale support, and as a handful of brands have continued to grow and really make a name for themselves, that comes with brand-building and improving customer loyalty around that brand. So it's more than just energy access, but it's creating that more consumer-driven approach where now a number, I mean, I would say the vast majority of the reputable manufacturers are now providing high-quality customer service. The efficient warranty process is everyone is able to monitor where their products are in the market, and the latest trend now in what's really making waves in the industry these days is either pay-as-you-go financing for end-users or using local banks or local borrowing clubs to find ways to make the most aspirational products even easier to afford. And I showed this slide because when we're talking about aspiration and brand that we want to emulate, we have to make sure that the products are seen in a certain light, so we cannot position our brand or products as an industry to be targeting only the lowest income or the poorest of the four, and a number of brands, including one degree, are now paying a lot of attention to our packaging, to the design of the product, and usability, and that sort of design and usability has to be considered when thinking about after-sales and customer service as well, and as the slide shows, there's a big reason why Toyota is the most desired brand of automobile in Africa, and this is a brand that we also want to emulate where the spare parts are easy to access, local technicians can actually make the repairs without any advanced training, and it's known for durability. So I speak with a number of folks in the industry about how we have to combine world-class design with the emerging market practicality, essentially, where as all the hardware and components become more efficient and cutting edge batteries come out and all of these new features are possible, we have to make sure that the support system is in place, and we, at least with our first flagship product, try to really utilize the existing ecosystem for making sure that customer service is existing. It's still a growing industry with proven track records and proven companies, but the customer experience has to be thought through end-to-end, and this is also considered, and near the top of that energy ladder I was showing, the customer interaction is also very critical. So I can speak on behalf of a number of companies in the space and say that we're all focusing much more on customer service as well, and one degree and others now do have SMS tools and ability to communicate with customers remotely. So that means we can collect usage data, we can see how the products are working, we can, whether by typing into the product itself or asking customers, we can get very good market feedback at a much lower cost than making trips to rural areas on a regular basis, and then preventive maintenance tips, for example. So for example, when it's rainy season or winter or cloudy or months in certain regions or geographies, we can send out messages to reduce usage, for example, and I think the bar for customer service, not within the energy space now, but I think the energy sector is looked at as almost a model for other industries and other enterprises because the competition and the number of industries, the number of players in the industry is forcing this bar to be quite a bit higher within our space. And I'll just have to mention this briefly, but this is to talk a bit more about typing into local resources and partners. So regarding, I'll just mention chloride excite here where they are now collecting or able to collect batteries on our behalf and they have facilities to properly dispose and recycle of these batteries as well, and these are tools that are already existing in these markets and can be utilized and end up building a much better customer experience. And to dive into our work with Coca-Cola, I think in order to make the industry really move as well, we have to really show the consumer or end-user benefits in financial terms and in terms that are really universal. And we had a six-month pilot study, or a six-month pilot with Coca-Cola and Nielsen Research was able to conduct all of the interviews and site visits during this process. This was all happening in Kenya, and what we found was a great try-back of a recombination of results where off-ex went down, operating hours went up, and sales increased as well. And making this sort of business case, speaking about consumers and moving away from the aid and donor community and donor projects, and really making large businesses interested in this space, it really just has to be a business case and this is one that is now proven and very easy to understand and one that we've seen the help for the industry not just one degree as a whole. If you can show these sort of figures to a small entrepreneur or micro-entrepreneur that sometimes will sleep or spend the entire night in their small shop, it does mean a whole lot. And this is $130 a month, a 1% increase in revenue, which is put in very simple terms for a reason. So as I was mentioning earlier, there really is a huge opportunity on the horizon and I think that we're taking advantage of now where we no longer have to wait for years or potentially even decades in some of these countries for power lines to be built. Many of us on the line are familiar with how mobile phones really were a repart technology for everything from communication to mobile banking to information collection. There's a figure that came out yesterday where 400 million Facebook users only access Facebook through their phones. I imagine a good chunk of those are coming in from off-grid areas and just like a mobile phone enables so much and as mobile phones are getting out there much more, with much higher penetration rates, especially in Kenya where a number of us operate, we have to really think about how those phones stay charged. And I think the mobile phone revolution that's happening really does, in addition to the work that the true pioneers like DOI have put in, really do pave the way for other companies to come in and use the demand or fill the demand. And while the systems are being decentralized and while consumers are being targeted and sold to in both urban and even most remote areas, as I mentioned earlier, the remote monitoring really opens up a whole new opportunity in terms of data collection, in terms of customer service and information gathering. And we have to remember that 10 years ago, as a market, we didn't have nearly as much data as we do now. And if we're all able to share an industry and share between ourselves as manufacturers and distributors and associates and partners in energy access, then we can really all build and implement better products to address this problem. And I know Hera will get a bit more into what creates demand and their model. So I'll just say that technology has come quite a long way and the market has as well. And we just have to keep thinking about what's possible in the next 10 years. Thank you. Thanks, Gaurav. Harold, you are taking sort of a multifaceted approach to this market, both with the commercial company. You come from an industry in Germany focused on so significantly different markets, significantly different responses. So we're interested in your experience and what you're seeing in the market as well. Harold? Yes, thank you, Rafa, for introduction. Good evening, good morning, everybody. As you can hear, I'm a German, so I have a nice German accent. Sorry for this. I would like to show you our work and how we look on this sector. As Rafa mentioned, we are a network of a foundation, Stiptons Linearchy, and two business companies, SoundConnect and SoundTransfer. We started 2004 in Ethiopia and we were asked to electrify the whole village with decentralized solar home systems, 10,000 inhabitants, 1,100 hearts. And while we did this, we realized that solar home systems could be really good entry products for off-grid people. So then we started in 2007 the pay-to-own and user finance to make solar home systems available. In 2008, we started to build a network of solar centers to do maintenance and service, and we are working today in Ethiopia, Kenya and Philippines. We will add some countries in the future. Our view on this market, what we found is that people who are living in off-grid areas have a dream, and the dream is mainly to be connected with the grid. The reason why this dream is there is mainly because they expect full power access because now they have electricity, light, livelihoods, communication, entertainment, everything what they think is necessary to have a good life. And what we found on the other side is the reality. If there is a grid, it is expensive, very expensive, and if you are connected, the grid is not reliable. But in most areas of the world in this developing country, the grid never will come. On the other side, we have a technical alternative. These are solar-driven off-grid solutions. Unfortunately, the image right now is for different reasons that these solar products are more like the first aid. But if you really want to have power, then you need the grid or you need to buy a diesel generator or whatever. So it is challenging for us in our work to explain people, but no, it's not just for first solar aid. It's really possible to cover all your needs and to provide you what the grid promises but doesn't deliver to you. And this is full power access for light, livelihoods, communication, entertainment. And in difference to the grid, the off-grid solutions are affordable and reliable. What we learned from our work is that the philosophy should be if you are off the grid, that this is not a problem. You can get full power access, including our end-user finances and including local maintenance and service. That's our philosophy and our approach. And you see some customers in these pictures on the left above in Ethiopia and on the right side in Kenya. So these are off-grid living so-called poor people. What we found in our work, in our experiences, is that we call it the five big A of the off-grid electrification. We learned it is necessary to go to the customer, to go to these people and understand what they really want. And if you ask them, you realize the typical off-grid customer doesn't exist. Some would like to have mobile light, the other one would like to have fixed light or mobile phone charging, another one wants to have power for radio or tape recorder, another one loves to have TV. So what usually or very often happens is that organizations or companies say, okay, maybe this is what you want, but we think this is not what you need. What we think is that you first have to replace your carers in London by light. And my opinion is why we don't treat off-grid people as human people and give them the right to choose what they want and what they can afford. For this, we have to tell them also what solar can do, what is possible with solar energy and what is not possible. What I mentioned already before is that nowadays we have to tell them solar is more than just a first solar aid. It really can cover your needs for livelihood, entertainment, communication and your whole life. The other thing is if they say, okay, we believe you, then the next question is how can we afford it? And what we learned is that poor people are poor, but they are not moneyless. They already spent money right now for their energy needs and they have probably more money. The challenge for the solar product is that the investment costs are relatively high, higher than for other energies. So now you have three options to make it affordable. One is you can reduce the quality of the solar home systems We think it's not the best option. The second option is you can reduce the size of the solar home system and just reduce it to one LED device. But then we lose the goal of full power access. So we choose the third option which does mean we do what everybody knows in Europe, US and everywhere in the world. If you would like to buy something, you can afford to go to a bank and you get a credit. And that's why we provide end user finance so people can afford by monthly payment their full power supply. The next challenge is even you can afford, how can you get it? And then we learn immediately, okay, we need to have a network of rural service stations and in these rural service stations need to be trained technicians who are able to install, to maintain, to manage all these things. And the fifth and I think it's the biggest A is after sales and maintenance. The biggest challenge is not to install and to sell. The biggest challenge is to let it run because to build customer trust you need to be there immediately or in short time if the customer has a problem with the system. And this is something which very often doesn't happen because a lot of companies are based in the capital and then they sell the products and they go back to the capital or the main city around. And if the customer has a problem nobody is there. And that's why for us after sales and maintenance is the key. What we do is what we did in Ethiopia and Kenya we built or we started to build a network of rural solar centers. You see the map of Ethiopia on the left and in Kenya on the right. Ethiopia so far has 14 solar centers and Kenya 8 they will be done by end of the year. And in these solar centers are working for up to 6 well trained technicians and they do everything which is related to the 5A. They ask customers what they want. They make it affordable. They make it available. They look for after sales service and they think how can we improve the ruralized by providing more of these sustainable off-grid solutions. Just two slides about the products just to give you a short impression. First we have our own solar home system with the paid to own charge controller which is a charge controller who provides first a lot of information to customers how long can I use the system, what's the battery status and all these things. But mainly it is a charge controller who disconnects the system if the customer doesn't pay his monthly fee. If he pays then he gets a code, he puts the code in and then the system runs until the next payment day. To manage all these things the Kenyan Sun Transfer Company designed a management software which we call M Solar because you can imagine if we have 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 customers and everybody wants to pay at the last day of the month this is a nightmare. So you can do it via mobile phone payment and immediately you get an SMS with the code. This is a very good Kenyan software. The other thing we are using is a mobile solar home system from Niva which is really a brand new product. We have exclusive city rides in our countries and with this you can build your solar home system, your own power supply like a Lego system. Lego is what kids have, you buy one component and if you have more money then you buy other components and you can build up the system. The applications we are selling are beside light, also TV fan in Philippines we start with the tablet and also we provide fridges and other things. The customer wants, we would like to supply. Also we supply mobile solar lanterns because this is part of the full power access that you have a mobile solar lantern for special uses. The next slide is already the conclusion and this conclusion I would like to use as a starter for the discussion because we are three presenters and we are working in the same field and our main goal is the same but we have a bit different approaches which is very good first of all for our customers or the people in off-grid areas because there has to be a challenge in the competition what's the best way to cover off-grid people. And I think there's every time a demand for small mobile plug-in and play products but also our experience is that off-grid households can afford full off-grid power access if you provide end-user financing with an end-user credit and off-grid households are able to use these energy products and in our work these bigger systems are the entry products and what we learned also is they await eagerly the sustainable supply for full off-grid power access. This is what we want to supply. In my understanding there's a connection of the off-grid industry in the past years that we were too much focused on the small mobile products and that's why I think now it's now time to bring the market in a balance and have a look for the bigger solutions as well because the main goal should be full power supply and I'm happy that now more and more companies like Xandratz, Mobizol, Atsuru, EBWO all these companies are providing the solar home systems and the bigger power supply solutions. If we do this more then it becomes full, no grid, no problem. Thank you very much. Thank you Harald and thank you Gaurav and Ned. We've got about 25 minutes now and we have a whole bunch of questions out there and I note that what we're trying to do is talk to an audience which has a broad range of experiences and knowledge of the sector. So we've tried to, as the presenters have tried to target as broad a range as possible but in so doing we've missed some things and so we use the question and answers to try to drill down a bit. There's a whole group of questions asking the kind of questions you'd expect from engineers actually about payback in economics, about ACDC issues, performance, how do these things perform. We didn't spend a lot of time around this but we can drill down a little bit in the question and answer. I'd like to start just because I think my job is to reflect on the three presenters first and Harald you have written publicly and extensively a criticism of the focus on solar lanterns and products which are down the spectrum where the products you're selling now are for the most part and you reference the success in Bangladesh where over 10 plus years of a heavily subsidized program two and a half million people have solar home systems but I note that in that market there's still tens of millions of households which are not able to participate in that program because it's essentially unaffordable for them and so you were questioning why IFC would get involved in the Bangladesh market targeting this area. You've said that solar lanterns are just an excuse as an entry level product so I just really have a practical question for you to help us fill in this understanding. How does, in a context where there's 1.2 billion people on the planet that do not have access to basic services how do we quickly help a significant number of those people get up that first rung of the modern energy ladder if there are not affordable products for that segment of the market? And I just, I know that you just laid out a thesis that said that you'll be able to lend money to customers but I'm wondering if your customer target is really the bottom end of the market if your product is available to them and how much capital you have to do this with because we are talking about 1.2 billion people. So my question is absent a incremental process where people are able to grab that first rung on the energy ladder in order to get to the second rung. How do we achieve scale? First of all, I don't think that the energy ladder is a good sample because I don't think that everybody has to go there or to use the energy ladder starting from the first step. A lot of people already are able to use the third, fourth or fifth step. The second is what we are talking about. We are talking about full power access or not because if we are talking about 1.2 billion people with no electricity then we say, okay, we need electricity for better livelihood and better income and all these things then we really talk about more than just providing solar lanterns. And what we found and what we can see in Bangladesh by the way this program nowadays is not heavily subsidized but what we see in our work and in India and in other countries as well solar home system can do this. Solar home systems are affordable if you provide the loan and the challenge is not that customers don't want or are not able to pay or don't understand the challenges that the finance for this industry is too small. And you see what's possible in Bangladesh if money is not really a problem then it really increases significantly. They are installing 60,000 solar homes. Where would the money come from? Where would the money come from that you are talking about? For us in Ethiopia and in Kenya we were looking for a lot of investors but these investors are more infected by the NGO world and they say, oh Africa is not reliable and we cannot invest in Africa and so on and that's why we are looking for entrepreneurial investors. We found them in Germany and in other European countries and also we invite other people to provide this money. Again, the main question is what is our goal? If our goal is to replace kerosene lamps by solar lanterns then this can be one goal. But my goal is that all people living in Australia have a full power supply that their dreams become true and reality that they have really full power access. We all share that goal, all the presenters and all the panelists do. I'll just ask how many people you've been able to reach with this model? Finally, 1.2 billion should be reached. How many people have you been able to reach with this model? For the moment we've reached more than 1 million with this approach but the question is more can we attract more investors to bring money in this sector and as you know better than me a lot of money is going to the small mobile products and really less money to the solar home systems industry and that's a question for IFC, what IFC can do and change the policy of IFC in the future that people really have a full power access. So I'll just answer your question then we'll move to the other questions. IFC is a bank that operates on commercial principles as does the rest of the multi trillion dollar financial services industry and so if we are going to mobilize that money into this sector it has to be proven and the credits have to be viewed as feasible and viable and that is the reality we live in and that is why to answer your question some money is now starting to flow to those companies that have been able to be successful selling according to their business model and that is why as those companies evolve into more complex larger systems and the consumers have been developed and have comfort with solar and they stopped hemorrhaging money to pay for kerosene and they have aspirational goals because they now see it's reachable for them that's why they're able to grow these businesses and get capital and that's what I see is happening in the market and that's really the reality of the financial market which is why I'm pressing for a very practical view of this nobody wants as an end game for a solar lantern to be the end the solar lantern is simply a step up the ladder and we can all take different approaches to this we can aim high or we can aim to get high through an incremental process which is practical and reflects the realities of technology in the market today and that's what we're seeing, that's the evolution if you look at actual numbers fold what companies are doing well it's those that are following that model and what companies are actually reaching people people that are finding a niche and able to get financing to reach that niche and do it and that's why it's exciting what's going on in this market as it is happening first of all I'm really glad that I see now more and more also thinking about real power supply for off-grid people and starting to invest in this the other thing is again I don't think the energy that we have we should talk or we should tell these people in off-grid areas in an ideologic way that they have to start the so-called energy ladder every time beginning with the first step what if they can afford and want to have other type of products why we don't provide this and sell this and supply this that's my question and that's why I'm really happy that the hype of solar lanterns is coming to an end I don't say that solar lanterns have not an influence and they are good, it's everything agreed but the hype, so now I'm really happy that I'll see another organization and more and more companies now are really interested in the full power access and now it becomes a balance more and more not enough yet but I hope with a lot of investors like I'll see we can do it So there's a couple of categories of questions that I'm identifying from the audience and one of them is related to what Harold and I have been talking about just now which is essentially questions about what it will take to scale what is needed to realize the power for all vision another person asked what is the barrier to widespread adoption is it really a question of affordability is it a question of building distribution let me ask Ned if he'll react on this the power for all presentation with his context but also because he's the company that is actually getting some scale so Ned do you want to react on that? Yeah that'd be great and I'll just react a little bit to this last back and forth because I do think you know Russell as you articulated we share the same end goal and you know Delight just to give some context to scale we've enabled, we've reached over 36 million people with our products and about roughly 10% of those are finance systems so we have a good perspective on both the systems products and the solar lanterns products and you know something that's clear to me is that many customers are not able to afford solar home systems up front it does target a higher income band within the population but as financing mechanisms are getting and financing pay-go technologies are innovating it's pushing sort of down into lower income families but there's still a lot of people who really just can't afford a solar home system so solar lanterns are an important stepping stone for them of course some people will jump right to a system but it's really not our view at all that lanterns are somehow first aid or that they're telling customers that they're less than human or anything like that I mean really we offer an array of products to customers and they're our boss at the end of the day they tell us what they want and we listen to them and we innovate and are providing products to respond to their needs and we think I completely agree that it's exciting that things are moving towards higher power systems and that as a technology and market are evolving it's opening up lots more opportunities but I just wanted to kind of lay out how I thought about solar lanterns in the market I think they're very important and they're going to continue to be an important solution for a lot of people just like with transportation not everyone can jump to a car immediately some people are going to buy a bicycle and some people are going to buy a motorcycle and those are good technologies also and are going to be an important part of the overall framework so in terms of what are the things that are going to be needed to really unlock the market to provide energy access for all so part of it in my view there is the financing component and I think to reach over a billion people with financed products it's a huge amount of working capital to put out there into the market and there's going to need to be a lot more proof in the market at even larger scale that these business models work to unlock really hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in capital to enable the market to move I think in addition to that there's policy changes that may need to happen and it's very country specific but in many of these countries where we operate our technologies are not competing on a level playing field with kerosene or diesel or other fuel technologies oftentimes these other fuels are subsidized whereas our products are taxed but we fundamentally believe that if there's a level playing field in the market through policy that's going to have these technologies will win and if they're not today then within several years the technology is going to be the place where where they can just completely leapfrog these kinds of fuel based technologies in these areas and we think in fact today when put head to head in the marketplace competitively solar win Thanks Ned so we have an audience of mostly engineers and so there's been a whole bunch of technical questions coming at us and we may be glossed over this because there's only so much we can talk about Gaurav, I'm wondering if what you can do is reply around the general notion of the direction that the technology has gone and Harold and Ned could fill in missing pieces but I see a lot of the questions are about how much wattage now is given how much battery hours and I think one of the principles that maybe is being lost here is that with solar systems the key is to think about services being delivered and just as important as the efficiency of the solar panel and the power of the battery both of which technologies are vastly improving is the efficiency of the service delivery unit the appliance whether it's a light, a TV, a fan, a cell phone and so Gaurav do you want to talk a little bit about the technical dimensions how that's changed how that's enabled some things to happen now and how we think about this in the sector Sure, thanks Russell so I think as I touched on a bit in the presentation when I first got involved with this work there were only CFL lights that were commonly available or more easily available so in terms of efficiency in more recent terms we started out with a two and a half watt LED bulb about a year and a half ago when we launched with this latest product and now we have one that's just about one watt and even brighter so the rate of efficiency improvement is really impressive and the costs are staying more or less the same so I think we're all able to as you said I think we're all able to use more efficient products and it's not necessarily about the size of the battery and I'm having to comment on that in just a second but it's not about the actual tech specs it's about the output or the application so we can easily provide over 100 lumens with one watt now and that wasn't even close to the case five years ago so regarding panel efficiency I think most of us are looking at around between 15 and 17% for the solar panel efficiency I think in addition to the battery capacity we're also looking as an industry looking into different battery technologies so there's of course lithium ion there's lead acid, different varieties of stuff like that lithium ion phosphate as well making strides and it really depends on your target market and as Ned and Harold were mentioning there is definitely a need for different technologies in different contexts and different customer segments so even country to country we've seen certain people actually prefer heavier lead acid battery because it feels more durable more powerful than an equally powerful lithium equivalent so there are always exceptions and considerations to be had in our product right now we have a six watt solar panel a seven amp power battery that's what we've had for and there are four 12-volt outputs on the back for the DC lighting and the draw is quite low I mean the levels that we're using are standard Edison E27 bulbs and those are getting more efficient as days go on I think as an industry we're all looking more into I think the lower cost to echo what Ned was saying we can't forget the lower cost and like we lower margin lantern for more portable solution space and those sort of lanterns are getting fortunately cheaper and cheaper and more efficient by the day and I think the real innovation is happening with the monitoring and with the usability and the design solar is not a new industry and it's not a new concept even in these markets it's just that the products are getting more approachable and intuitive and easier to maintain and the quality is finally there so I think it's much more than just the specs I'm not an engineer but I definitely appreciate all the questions I'd be happy to take any more technical ones offline So on that point about offline in the timing we're scheduled to end this in about three minutes we're going to extend it for about ten if the panelists can all stay but then again the question and answers can remain up for a bit longer than that if the panelists can maybe weigh in on those when we finish this or maybe as we're talking then that way we can get some of these questions answered if you're in position to answer them There's also a few references that I'd like to share I'm going to try to get them up in a printed version so everyone can see it but just very quickly there is a excellent website where a lot of this community communicates with each other called Lumina Net so you can Google Lumina L-U-M-I-N-A Net and a lot of the questions transpire there around technical questions market questions that sort of thing also if you go to LightingGlobal all one word LightingGlobal.org that's for a lot of the work that I see done and links to other sites are there including the technical specifications for LightingGlobal verified products and a list of and specifications for the products that have been verified some of the questions coming in now reflect that we're missing some key understanding here in some areas so people are asking things like how exactly are we talking about this transition from lanterns and solar home systems are they different providers pay-as-you-go systems this is a big conversation because it's a new dynamic in the market let me just say one thing about this to try to clarify these questions there are a range of products available in the market that are quality verified by LightingGlobal they range in price retail from about $8 to up to kits which are packaged and sold as consumer products that consumers install and service up to maybe $200 and the LightingGlobal verification is now expanding up to 100 watt systems and these have been transformative in the market because it has allowed standardization of it gave a touch point for consumers to identify quality and it has a range of different products with a range of different targeting range of different market segments that deliver a range of different products and the evolution is continuing now around high efficiency DC products TVs fans lights the things that provide service into these systems and those are being packaged now and sold as kits by the same providers and the other modification the other evolution is related to what Harald was talking about which is pay as you go systems where you have some sort of an embedded chip that allows consumers to access the service of their device by paying a daily, a weekly, or a monthly fee often if there's mobile money in their countries through mobile money or with some sort of link typically with the telecoms industry where you're buying a scratch card for example and getting a number that you program into your device and it operates and this is the way one of the way that we're creating security behind for borrowers that allows financiers to come to the table because it creates a credit security for lenders whether they're companies like Harald's or whether they're banks and financial institutions so this is sort of the spread technologically of what's evolved bringing evolution of LED efficiencies battery efficiencies and PD efficiencies that not just is driven down price substantially but mostly is in crude-proof performance hours of operation of batteries service, amount of light delivered per watt input and the amount of power that you're transforming the light rays into so this is essentially what's been going on technologically Harald and have you been looking at some of the questions coming online is there any that you want to pick up? There are so many questions and I would like to invite all whoever question to send me an email because it's not possible to answer immediately and in a very short way all these questions which are very interesting so my email address is hs at solar-federation.org hs at solar-federation.org you also can see on a web page where we provide a lot of serious information about the industry this is www sun minus connect minus news.org again www sun minus connect minus news.org and you are invited to invite me and then ask all your questions which I will answer then I guess there was another general technical question about AC DC issues the issues really relate to these solar systems are DC based and the issues relate to while there is a very well developed global market for AC appliances the market for DC appliances is evolving we have to first prove that there is a consumer base that has solar power for whom large producers of high quality fans, TV's these sort of lights would sell into so this is part of the market development work that we do is proving a market mobilizing manufacturers to make products for that market to make it possible the interchange between AC and DC becomes most relevant when we are talking really about mini-grids and potential future interface integration into a grid but transforming from AC to DC for the most part is not at issue here these are DC systems someone asked about safety issues from my point of view I don't see safety issues with regard to the solar systems anyone on the panel want to reply on that if I'm missing something these are of course you have to protect your system carefully because DC it's electricity and so we have a lot of uses and resistors to protect it but then it's finally it's safe it's not a dangerous technology different take in that anything you want to add you know nothing to add to that these are low voltage systems at least the current kind of systems that are out there in the market and what Delight provides so there's not really hazard risk if someone were to even if they spliced the wire or anything like that it's not like putting your finger in the AC socket it's a pretty low meta-voltage I think across the board I would highlight the end of life as a potential longer-term safety issue or environmental issue but there are some solutions and responsible manufacturers collecting units at the end of life as well and then someone asked about the benefits beyond economic a little elaboration on health and safety I think the best thing for me to do there is refer you to paper that Evan Mills has written where he dug in pretty deep to issues around fires health he did a meta-study that aggregated a lot of other people's work and then he actually went into hospitals in West Africa and looked at the enrollment roles and found that fires from kerosene had been grossly unreported in the past and poisoning from children because much of the kerosene is sold in for example coke bottles as an extensive problem so there's a lot of data there around that I think a really good impact is time simply time if sun raises at six and sunset is at six in the evening then at six in the evening there's no life because you don't have light there's no house no outside so if you provide light inside house or outside with mobile lanterns whatever then communication starts you can do your homework and your business in the evening for example there was a tailor in Ethiopia a very poor area and he told us since I have the solar home system I can work in the evening and the sun is shining very bright and more efficient in the evening and it helps our whole family I wanted to add on one more thing actually I saw some questions come up here about how are solar lanterns really acting as a stepping stone and this kind of fights into a little bit of what Harold was saying and that with the solar lantern products they typically pay for themselves in between two to four months so people are already spending money let's say on kerosene for lighting and once they get these products they don't need to buy that kerosene anymore in addition to that cost savings there's also productivity gains because you can do more when you have more lighting so what we find is that both the cost savings and the productivity gains people effectively have some more disposable income and they invest those in many things where education or a broad variety of things that that family chooses to do but some portion of that we find that families really are interested in investing that in increased energy access and that enables them to save up for another product or a system and that's really one of the ways we see to actually manifest we actually talked to a lot of our customers and find that many customers don't just buy one they buy one and then they upgrade a bigger one or they buy a system so we find that giving people some access to energy there's this virtuous cycle that happens because of the ability for people to save money and actually earn more income and that's some of how we've actually seen this kind of conceptual ladder framework manifest itself in reality let's also remember that it's very very difficult for someone to set aside a month's worth of income to buy something if they don't have confidence in it and that's why the stepping stone also happens is if you can buy and get confidence and it's actually you realize you've got the power you actually can think about a TV you actually can think about a fan and that's another part of the virtuous cycle it's about confidence I would love you to mind to continue on Ned's talk about payback on payback and ROI for these PF owners that I mentioned earlier so in that Nielsen research it was showing I think it was $15 per month spent on lighting that's for the interior light not anything on the outside and the $130 increase in sales so if you want to combine those and say $100 combined the products typically cost less than $100 so the payback is quite fast and the companies that are doing pay as you go systems or what Harle is doing with leasing they're pegging their payment so it's a level less than the costs avoided from the services that are being replaced so you get a higher level of service with the health safety benefits the business models that virtually all the companies are using are to make sure that that's at no net additional monthly cost at least the companies that are getting traction I would highlight something you mentioned sometimes beyond the same line this is confidence or trust that people, that the customer trusts you as a company this is the main key that's why we think after sales service is so important to build trust customers you have to be there if they have a problem or if they would like to increase the system or whatever trust is the key and this you cannot pay or do with investors or whatever this is a special attitude corporate culture but trust is the key excellent thank you Harle I have to be respectful of the time so we're ten minutes over the original schedule can the panel members can you take a look at some of the questions that are on there Yana and Holly said that we would be able to access this for another half hour or so if you have enough time to please take a look and maybe respond on some of these then the people out there listening can see the responses of the questions we were not able to get to I saw one question from Amazon Payment in one in Angola just by random she said we are in Angola in a place where rural areas don't have a bank account I think that's a question for the pay as you go or pay to own assistance there are different types of ways to pay you can do this via your mobile bank account like in Pisa and Kenya if it exists but for example with our system you can pay cash in our solar system in our solar center the customer comes to our rural solar center to our technicians and he pays cash so the system of pay as you go whatever works with a bank account or with no bank account it's independent from mobile phone or not mobile phone that's very important to know thanks Harle, that is helpful and I think that relates to the Angola question and the question about the Philippines are similarly a huge question that I want to close with which is where are these products available and how do we access them and I'll say that the market is evolving stepwise and there is a fairly strong presence in India a strong presence in much of sub-Saharan Africa there's different companies that are able to get to different places and Gaurav started in West Africa because that's the area he was living in and he knew you can as I referenced you can go to the lighting global website to see at least the devices up to 10 watts we will be expanding this over the next year up to 100 watt system so that's a nice reference point to quality products and how to reach the manufacturers the manufacturers are trying to expand these companies that are on the panel are trying to expand their footprint to be available other places it's an evolving industry everywhere yet ISC has a presence in multiple African and South Asian countries where we support the market's development we're not everywhere yet in this market so it's evolving I think you have to try to contact the companies at the global level to see if they have distributors locally in your markets and by the way yes go ahead the people who are asking from Philippines where can I buy it D-Light is in Philippines I'm sure you can buy one degree solar in Philippines as well and of course some transfer is working in Philippines as well so the Philippines are on the same side yep excellent so thank you Harold thank you Gaurav and thank you Ned Yana and Holly for organizing this and most of all to the participants don't forget to register to get credit if you want to do that thank you everybody