 All right. Well, hello, and good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today, we're pleased to bring you the latest in our 2015 webinar series where we will focus today on off-grid energy solutions and the role of services in driving adoption. We developed this webinar in collaboration with Nako Karaba of S3IDF and Leslie Marincola of Angaga. My name is Yana Aranda, and I will be one of the moderators for today's webinar, along with Barass Manchanda of One Degree Solar. When I'm not doing this, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and E4C as the director of program. Now I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar. One of the global goals for sustainable development is affordable and clean energy. Yet globally, over 1.2 billion people still lack access to an electricity grid. More than 95% of them live in sub-Saharan Africa or developing countries in Asia. 84% are in rural areas, according to the International Energy Agency. Furthermore, off-grid consumers face an economic penalty for this inequality. In East Africa alone, a typical family can spend up to 20% of their annual income on lighting and cell phone charging. While governments and large NGOs are working to improve energy access, social enterprises have become an important player in lighting up dark homes. To tell you more about this, we've invited two social entrepreneurs in this field, that Polkadaba of S3IDF, which stands for Small Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund, and Leslie Marincola of Angaga. They are joined by a fellow colleague, Grav Manchanda of One Degree Solar, as today's moderator. Welcome and thank you all for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series. Along with myself, we have Michael Mater of E4C and ASME, Holly Snyder-Brown, and Jackie Halliday of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the slide. Webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Okay, apologies there. Here we go. Before we move on to our presenters, we thought it would be a good idea to tell you about E4C and who we are. E4C is a knowledge hub in a global community of nearly one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. These can include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides classroom access to practical and current news, professional development resources, and a growing inventory of field-tested solutions. E4C members enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with our site, the better we will be able to serve you content that meets your needs and interests. We invite you to join E4C's passionate global community and contribute to making people's lives better all across the world. Please check out our website, www.engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and sign up. Now, the webinar you're participating in today is part of E4C's professional development offerings. The webinar series is a free, publicly available series of online seminars showcasing best practices in thinking of development practitioners in the field. Information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archived videos of past presentations, can be found on the E4C webinar page and the webinar URL is also there. If you're following us on Twitter, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. And you're also able to access all of the recordings on our YouTube channel and with the URL listed on the slide. Our next webinar will be on October 21st at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, and our topic will be the role of standards in global development. I apologize, the role of standards in sustainable energy for all. Check out the E4C webinar page for updates on our speakers and registration details. If you're already an E4C member, we will be sending invitation to the webinar directly. Now then, a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's see first where everyone is from today. In the chat window, which is located to the bottom right of your screen, please type in your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, you can access it by clicking the chat icon on the top right corner of the screen. So I'll go ahead and get us started and I'm entering our information here. Hello to everybody from New York. And I see we have a lot of folks from around the United States. We have New Jersey, California. Also internationally, we have folks joining us from India. I see South Africa. Welcome everybody. It's a pleasure to see all of you from all across the world. Now, any technical questions or administrative problems should go into this chat window. Feel free to send a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin if you have any issues as well. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks you may have for the audience or the speakers. However, during the webinar, please use the Q&A window located directly below the chat to type in your questions for the presenters. Again, if you don't see this, you can access it by clicking the icon on the top right-hand corner. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening WebEx up in a different browser. Now, following the webinar to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour, PDH, for the session, please follow the instructions at the top of the E4C webinar page in the listed webinar URLs right there. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce you to our moderator, Gaurav Manchanda, who is the CEO of One Degree Solar. The company has investors, clients, and partnerships such as Niter Electric, Coca-Cola, IFC, the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association, and the United Nations Foundation. Previously, Gaurav spent years in post-conflict Liberia as an advisor to the Deputy Ministry of Health, a position sponsored by the Clinton Foundation. In this role, he secured $10 million in emergency funding from the World Bank and led initiatives that provide solar energy and electronic information systems to off-grid health clinics. Additionally, Gaurav has advised the Liberian Rural and Renewable Energy Agency and republications for the USAID Powering Health Initiative. We're very excited to have Gaurav join us today, and I'll hand it over to him to introduce our speakers. I'll hand over to Nikul for his session. And before I do, I'll say that the Q&A window is open, so please reach out to your questions there and we'll address all the questions at the end of the presentations. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Gaurav, for giving me the opportunity. Thanks a lot also to Engineering for Change for this opportunity. We're really happy as S3IDF to talk about some of the work that we've been doing and kind of share some of our insights to everyone else, and hopefully we can get some kind of conversation during the webinar and then afterwards as well for hopefully some collaboration. And I believe I have control of the slides, so great. So S3IDF, which is a nonprofit based in both Cambridge, Massachusetts, the U.S., as well as Bangalore, India, and we have a mission to build inclusive market systems through small-scale enterprises. We also have an inherent desire to spread the values of our approach and the way we do enterprise development to influence other organizations, that being donors, implementing organizations, investors, product companies, and the others include product companies and financial institutions and other organizations that we work with on the ground to apply either the full or parts of our approach in their work. We have an emphasis on creating access to clean energy technologies for the poor and poor entrepreneurs to benefit the communities they work in as well as create job opportunities, less in dependency on fossil fuels and create opportunities to earn income. We have, as Gaurav highlighted, we have an active project portfolio in India, over 150 projects. In addition to that, we are currently conducting market assessments to expand our work into Cambodia and Myanmar, which we can definitely talk about offline if people are interested in those geographies, and more pertinent to India, we currently host the Clean Energy Access Network, or CLEAN, which is based in New Delhi, and it's actually a collection of decentralized clean energy practitioners addressing the challenges they face in creating energy access for the poor all across the country. So the approach that we use is called the Social Merchant Bank Approach, or the SMBA, and that's the acronym that I'll use from now on. And the SMBA is based on a lot of years and a lot of years of our colleagues and partner organizations that we worked with who realized that we needed to bundle several services together to provide poor entrepreneurs the necessary resources they needed in order to make the partnerships, start their enterprises, and scale as they needed to on their own time. So as you can see it is, and hopefully it's visible to everybody on the webinar, but it's three bundled services addressing the financing, the technology, and the business development, or the capacity-building sides of constructing a small-scale enterprise. Our first one is leverage co-financing, where we bring in commercial, local financial institutions, and now these can be MFI's, these can be commercial banks, they can be crowdfunding platforms. It just depends on the community that we're working with, the entrepreneur that we're working with, and the financing constraints that they've realized at the time. And what we do is we use grant funding to create revolving funds and host them within these institutions to stimulate different types of debt conditioning instruments that the entrepreneurs themselves can take advantage of to use for constructing their enterprises, i.e. acquiring different technologies, different clean energy technologies that they may need, setting up other set-up costs that may be relevant in terms of hiring, and so on and so forth. We also, in this time, create technology buyback agreements with product companies that we put in touch with our poor entrepreneurs so that the entrepreneurs are not just included in the supply chain with the financial institution, but also with a company that is going to be providing them with those critical products so that they are creating relationships on two fronts. Good segue into kind of the next part of our approach, the technology access and knowledge. We, S3IDF, develops and integrates technology options that are appropriate for the poor, adapting off-the-shelf technology, communicating with different technology companies that can provide products at costs but what normal consumers, such as all of us, can get so that it meets the needs of the poor and it can be provided at an affordable cost to the poor. And through this time, we also work with the entrepreneurs to make sure that they are getting kind of the relevant right products to sell based on what the demand is. And kind of added on to that, we work all along the supply chains with relative technologies so that it includes linked productive use applications. So sometimes, well, if we're not granting just pure energy access, maybe it can be something like agricultural machinery that a poor community needs access to. S3IDF will work with and identify a product company to work with that entrepreneur, link them up, do the same process again, finance financing, help the entrepreneur provide or get access to all the resources that they need. And finally, the last kind of the last part of our approach is our business development support that we provide where we sit down with the entrepreneur, we make sure that we walk out a viable scale model that they can use to sell their product, hire more people from the poor community themselves, expand wherever they want to, providing hands-on training in a formal setting, in a more informal setting, more mentoring on a case-by-case basis so that they are able to use us as a resource long after our formal engagement, so to speak, has been completed. Now, the purpose of this again was because of the fact that there were so many gaps that we had seen in India where one organization may provide just the financing, technological innovation. One organization may just provide the capacity building. We, S3REF, had this belief in combining all three of those, utilizing different amounts depending on the entrepreneur's knowledge, depending on the landscape, depending on the types of technologies needed, so that it remains, so the SMBA as a result remains a very flexible approach that can be provided, not just in India, but in other geographies as well. I won't go through, I won't read off the investment criteria, but on the left side is kind of the investment criteria that S3REF uses before deploying funds from our revolving fund to set up small-scale enterprises that meet the needs. And similar to what I was stating before with our leverage co-financing, we believe in the concept of blended capital structures to construct these enterprises because they are being used with poor entrepreneurs. The poor, there is this ability and we've seen in our case in India that the poor do not have access to formal financial institutions or they do not have access to get the products such as LED lights, CFL lights, or if we're using small micro or picohydro systems. So through this using a blended capital structure, we're able to create financing deals that integrates not only our funds from our, not only our capital from the revolving fund, but also funds that the entrepreneur may be able to provide, sweat or hard equity in order to bring about a deal and bring about a relationship with the financial institution. And through that, it kind of provides everyone's skin in the game where everyone has an incentive to make sure that this enterprise or this project goes off well, including the entrepreneur. As stated before, we go over the terms of the loan or the terms of whatever relationship is between the financial institution and the entrepreneur to make sure that monthly installments are being paid on time, because that relationship will stand far longer after we've left and it's our intention that it remains like that. It brings us to some more kind of challenges and insights that we've seen in the Indian context. A general belief that S3IDF finds is there's not enough donor capital to solve poverty on its own. And in this case, providing or fulfilling the goals related to providing energy access to all those across the developing world. However, S3IDF does believe and can use this funding to act as catalyzing instruments to unlock local private sector financing and again, listed several examples there. The key in the SMBA again to reiterate is that careful intermediation and technical assistance is really required really understanding the local geographies that you work in. India is such a vast geography what may be prevalent in a project site in Karnataka may not be prevalent or relevant in Telangana for example. Similarly, what may be relevant in an open site in India may not be relevant in a rural site. So, that careful kind of inspection and that careful identification of entrepreneurs is really necessary. And hence, as I've highlighted before, the key is also to integrate the poor being the entrepreneurs and the communities that they benefit into the mainstream economy through these kind of local actors and through the us using the SMBA because we've seen a lot of times that there's a lack of institutional structures that include the poor as customers as beneficiaries. We've seen that there's a lack of economic inclusion between the poor and these formal institutional players in the local economies to drive access to energy and those other basic services. And there's also a necessity from what we've seen in our field work to break the perception that the poor have no ability to pay for simple but highly critical clean energy technologies. They do. Generally, when we sit down with our entrepreneurs it just means that the pay structure needs to be different. It can't be on a monthly basis. It has to be on a daily basis or it has to be on a weekly basis. But that doesn't... But again, it just means but it still means that they are willing to pay for an LED light to as you can see in that picture there to help with silk reeling. It can help pay for micro hydrosystem that's going to aid in providing lighting, mobile charging and also this unintended benefit of irrigation. The poor are willing to pay for all of these innovative technologies. It's just the case that they're not being provided the right products or the right services by these formal players in order to access them. And so S3IDF is trying to drive this not just in India but in the other countries that we work in and across the world through networks that we are participating in. And I know I'm kind of tight on time so I don't want to take up too much more time but here's just some examples of our work that I wanted to kind of highlight. S3IDF, we work in urban rural areas, multiple states in India and the big thing is you know every single community is different. Numerous concepts to discuss you know as I've kind of stated we've done micro hydroprojects in the western Ghats for example to help create energy services and create this unintended benefit for agriculture and irrigation by controlling the flow of runoff water coming down from the western Ghats. The first time we actually did this project a number of years ago when we found this benefit we immediately kind of revamped our project concept, went to another community very close by and were able to actually fine tune go to the technology supplier and fine tune the product that was being used in the system thereby giving the entrepreneur and as a result the community another incentive to kind of participate reap the benefits of this. A lot of times though mobile technology has been really prevalent across the developing world we've also found that providing a door-to-door service in a lot of the enterprises really works and you can see the bottom right picture one of our entrepreneurs going around in a peri-oven market in Bangalore providing renewable energy lighting to street hawkers and vendors so that they can work later into the night extend their business hours raise their incomes as a result while the entrepreneur raises his income he's able to pay for extra lighting go to expand markets hire a couple more people but just a simple addition of providing this door-to-door service and collecting daily payments instead of monthly payments really goes a long way to address some of the concerns that the poor have in creating energy access and kind of solving the issues of the as I've said granting energy access should not be restricted to urban versus rural versus peri-oven areas yesterday we worked in all of those areas and we've seen that while all of them have different challenges we do recognize the benefits and the poor and poor communities in all of those areas still have a set of demands related to we would like energy and we would like lighting for the evening, we would like clean cooking solutions, we would like mobile charging stations set up what kind of enterprise can provide us this and as I kind of said initially at the beginning of my presentation apart from creating granting energy access purely yesterday I've kind of gone beyond energy access is provided but to provide other basic services for the poor and this can relate to water sanitation, as you can see in the top left-hand corner ICT, livelihoods and others so that the poor have access to these services they're able to climb out of poverty, they're able again to connect with these formal institutional players, integrate themselves into the local economy and become a kind of self-perpetuating mini-economy as it were but cooperating with but able to grow out of greater than the amount that they were doing previously I think I'm running out of time so I just want to end it there I've left my email address for anyone on the webinar in case they want to get in touch again, really thank God of, really thank Engineering for Change for this opportunity and I will give it back to him thank you okay, thanks very much Nicole excellent presentation, time to be very very insightful and great work that you're doing there in India primarily, it's my pleasure to introduce another entrepreneur doing wonderful work in the space of what I would call financial inclusion or access to both finance and energy Leslie Marin-Cola, Leslie is the founder and CEO of Angaza a B2B provider of Pays You Go energy technology that enables off-grid families and emerging markets to purchase solar energy through affordable payments spread over time Leslie has a bachelor's and master's in product design from Stanford University and has been recognized by many organizations including Business Week as a rising star in the entrepreneurial community her vision is to solve the world's most widespread problems like energy poverty with market-driven technology innovation and Leslie I will hand off to you wonderful, thank you girls I'm going to steal the presenter ball from you perfect alright, thank you, good morning or good evening wherever you are, thank you for Engineering for Change for inviting me to speak today dive right in alright, as Garov mentioned my name is Leslie Marin-Cola CEO of Angaza, we're a for-profit business based in the San Francisco and Nairobi, Kenya working to increase access to solar energy and underserved off-grid markets particularly East Africa and India and we do this through innovative and user financing technology which you'll hear me talk a lot about before I dive too deep into what we're working on I just want to make sure you have a context of the off-grid energy market we've already heard a bit about this on the webinar thus far so I won't go too deep but definitely want to paint this picture for you because this is the act of burning kerosene for light every night that is literally the only option for over a billion people around the world kerosene is a very expensive energy option, it's very dim, toxic dangerous, led to a lot of fires from open plains basically we are focused on transitioning families off of kerosene to solar in very sustainable scalable ways the other sort of picture that is very common around off-grid markets is the use of cell phones and I'm not talking about iPhones, these are usually what are called feature phones like you see in the picture here and many off-grid families are relying on these mobile phones both to keep in touch with family but also to conduct business so they're very important and actually sort of surprising about 85% of the world now is covered by a mobile network so it's particularly hard now to find areas that do not have some sort of cell phone signal it may be intermittent it may not be super reliable but the world is becoming more and more connected I want to highlight a couple differences between Africa and India which I think are particularly interesting, you just heard in a cool talk a lot about the energy challenges in India, we worked some in India mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa so a couple differences here, you can see here the numbers from 2011 about 120 million homes off-grade in Sub-Saharan Africa and about 80 million homes off-grade in India but if you look at the expert projections out through 2030 you'll see that the number in India is dropping to about 30 million off-grid homes whereas the number of off-grid homes in Sub-Saharan Africa has grown to 130 million so why is this? Well, a couple different reasons India has more extensive grid power and it's actually being extended faster than Africa India has a larger number of government incentives that are actually promoting clean energy solutions and India tends to have higher density of population clusters which means you can get energy access to a larger number of people within a smaller geographic area so in Africa much of the expected energy access progress will actually be offset by population growth whereas the opposite is expected in India so that's sort of an interesting forecast of the future a couple other differences to note kerosene subsidies are actually more prevalent in India than they are in Africa which is very important when you have to consider the cost of solar and how solar competes against kerosene it's actually harder for solar to compete in India because of these kerosene subsidies the existence or lack thereof of mobile money platforms is very important mobile money tends to be a lot more prevalent and adopted at the end user level in East Africa than it is in other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and India and this is important when you're thinking about in the context of pay as you go solar which I'll talk a lot about actually collecting these recurring solar payments is it through cash or is it through mobile money and then another key difference between these regions is really just what percentage of the population has access to a bank account there's a much larger unbanked population throughout Sub-Saharan Africa which actually means that mobile money in India is less needed because a larger percentage of the population has access to a bank account so these are just a couple differences between the regions I thought it would be interesting to highlight because this really affects how you price and deliver pay as you go solar in the various regions so let's zoom down to a typical East African family these numbers are representative East Africa not necessarily other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa or India but your typical East African family will spend over $100 per year on kerosene fuel this is often up to 20% of their income which is crazy but the key is that they're not spending all of this at one time they're literally buying kerosene by the leader maybe every several days or every week and when they have disposable cash so this is very sporadic expenditure in small amounts over time if you look at the entire global energy expenditures on fuel-based lighting it's about $30 billion per year which means these 1.2 billion people who are off-grid are spending $30 billion per year to buy kerosene it's a big number made up of a large population spending small amounts of money so solar makes a lot of sense for these markets you heard Nicole talk about this already why does solar make so much sense well a lot of these markets live in sort of dispersed areas with low density really doesn't make a lot of sense to extend the power grid out into a lot of these rural regions but solar provides distributed energy solution where you can even provide it at a household level these days solar, LE, battery technology it's all becoming more efficient, more robust the cost is coming down so it's sort of a great time to deliver solar to these markets as long as you can make it financially accessible to the end user I want to talk a little bit more about the market growth here because I think it's very important to consider how solar is going to work at scale in a sustainable way for all the companies involved that are trying to deliver solar the manufacturers, the distributors the sales agents who might be local entrepreneurs selling solar products to the end user and also making financial sense for the end user so in the short term experts like the World Bank IFC estimate that it's about a $2.7 billion annual solar lantern market if all these companies were able to sell solar lanterns to every household that's currently dependent on kerosene and what does that mean if you can sell solar lanterns to all of these off-grade households you can actually save over $27 billion per year by ceasing those kerosene purchases that's a huge amount of money that these families can save by switching to solar just projecting this out a bit in the medium and longer term it's estimated at over $50 billion market opportunity when you're looking at the solar energy that can be delivered to these rural populations as well as the appliances that go along with having energy or powering lights, charging cell phones powering radios but if you look at the market today it's estimated that only $200 million of this market have actually been tapped this is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the size of the market and we believe out on Gaza that this is really due to the lack of in-user financing for solar which is really just preventing the proliferation of solar energy solutions so this is what I'm about to talk a lot about so as I said solar makes a lot of sense but you have to price it correctly you can actually make solar cheaper than kerosene by spreading out the payments over time and the beauty of this is you can make it a no-brainer to make the switch from kerosene to solar because you can actually spend less money on a per week basis for solar we call this kind of financing pay as you go solar it's exactly like what it sounds and this is pretty similar to purchasing airtime in small amounts as you use it the same concept for solar so I'm going to talk a little bit about the pay as you go supply chain because there's multiple players at work here that make this work manufacturers these are like actually Garve company for example one degree solar these are designers and manufacturers of might be portable solar lights solar home systems any combination of energy plus storage which are often selling through their own distribution networks or through third party distributors distributors take sort of all shapes and sizes most of them tend to sell through networks of either sales agents or small vendors and the reason for that is these sales agents and vendors are usually co-located in the regions that they're actually selling and then of course you have the end user in this supply chain so most pay as you go companies are actually vertically integrated and span this entire supply chain where they're manufacturing their own products distributing them providing the after sales support to end users Angasa operates a little bit differently though like I said in the beginning we're a technology company we design the pay as you a technology and we sell that technology to third party manufacturers and third party distributors who actually want to offer pay as you a product the reason we have this B2B approach is we want to allow our partners to continue to focus on their core businesses usually manufacturing or distribution and offer them pay as you go and a fraction of the time not a fraction of the cost because it's ready up and running from day one so I'm sure there are a lot of technically minded folks on this webinar since it is the engineering for change webinar so I want to dig a little bit deeper into our technology and break it down break our platform down into the three main components that have to be in place to have a functioning scalable pay as you a platform the three main components are embedded pay as you go technology which is essentially a hardware and firmware that you embed into a solar product to have two functions one this embedded technology actually meters the energy output so you can deactivate the product if the customer hasn't prepaid the other function of the embedded technology is to actually make that product connected to the cloud so it can both receive new payment information as the end user makes these recurring payments and it can also in some cases send back information to the cloud so it can send back usage and diagnostic information so distributors can actually know exactly how their customers are using these products so manufacturers like I said in the supply chain before manufacturers are particularly interested in this embedded pay as you go technology because they need to put this into their products and make them talk to the cloud the distributors in this picture are particularly concerned about having a web interface this is basically a cloud based software platform or a portal where they can log in and track all their customers see all their payments over time essentially manage their entire loan portfolio what's really interesting about pay as you go technology though is it's connecting all these solar products that previously were unconnected before pay as you a technology existed a lot of solar products were being sold and distributors never had any follow up with customers and really didn't know if the products were continued to function or be used but pay as you go technology is really changing that and adding a lot of transparency into these distribution channels and then the third bucket you have that sales agents are particularly concerned about is having some sort of portal on a mobile phone which might be a low end android smartphone but some portal to really track their in customers and just track them on a very granular basis to know who's late on payment or who needs to make a payment so we provide a mobile app as well that allows these sales agents to really run their own businesses and selling pay as you a product and processing payments I'm going to go a little faster here because I'm running out of time but I want to talk just quickly about three different embedded technologies that you can actually use within solar products to meter the energy output and connect them to the cloud like I mentioned these are the three primary technologies that Angaza offers and the reason we offer three is I think it's important to understand that not one technology is going to work for every type of product, every size of product and in every market there's a lot of different factors and decision points that go into choosing an embedded technology but there's definitely cost trade-offs you can get an embedded technology that adds as little as only 20 cents to the cost of a product versus if you're going GSM it might add $20 to the cost of the product so one solution which might work for a small portable lantern won't work for a large solar home system there's also certain trade-offs about whether you want to get that data transfer back from the product do you want to track exactly how much light a customer is using versus how much energy can be provided by remote customer support by knowing for example how much solar energy is being used to charge the battery and those tend to have cost trade-offs as well just quickly in terms of the end customer experience here this cable base is very low cost technology you're actually leveraging a mobile phone that usually the sales agent carries to act as a data connection between the product and the cloud with a keypad scenario this middle scenario that you see here this is sort of more of a customer independent solution but it doesn't have the ability to get data back from the product because you're actually receiving a code and typing that code directly into a keypad on the product or remote that ships with the product and then on the high end like I mentioned you can actually embed a GSM module directly into a product to get it to be constantly cloud connected but this really is only restricted to areas that have the mobile coverage to be able to support this constant data connection but like I said in the beginning this is about 85% of the world right now this software platform I'd say is really the brains of the operation it's how these distributors are registering new customers entering customer information tracking their payments as they're making their weekly solar payments and you can see here an image of one particular product where we track different brightness levels that the customer is using of the product and it's interesting because you can actually see how the usage of the product correlates to expected repayment behavior and really focus in on certain sales channels that might not be optimized and then last but definitely not least like I mentioned is the mobile app and I really think sales agents are the link in the supply chain which is basically making or breaking the success of PageUgo why is that? Well the sales agents responsible for finding new customers for registering new customers most importantly for training new customers these customers need to understand how to use a solar product but they also need to understand how to use the PageUgo technology so they can easily make their weekly payment for solar and have their product activate correctly so delivering that customer education is one of the most important jobs of the sales agent but like I said in the beginning I really believe that PageUgo technology can only scale or sorry PageUgo as a business business model can only scale if you have technology in place because these sales agents need a way to just understand the payment status of their customers and be able to process payments this is interesting in some markets like India for example where mobile money is not as prevalent the sales agents are actually collecting cash payments on a weekly basis and remitting those cash payments back to the headquarters of the distributors often so you need to track where cash is in the system how much cash is a single agent collected and how when and how much have they remitted back to the distributor and finally I'll just leave you with a couple of thoughts about the role of data driven distribution I've alluded to the fact that with PageUgo technology in place and a lot of these products you can now get usage and diagnostic data back from the products what PageUgo is also doing is allowing distributors to have long-term relationships with their customers a customer for example might buy an entry level solar light make on-time payments for that light and get a certain credit history within non-gazes platform the distributor can then use that credit history and really understand the financial risk they would be taking to then extend a 10 watt or 100 watt loan to that same customer and it really helps customers just increase their energy access over time by forming these credit histories within the system so how does data driven distribution work well it's sort of a three stage process as you collect more and more data in the system definitely a lot of individual user data is being collected especially the phone number of the customer the phone number is very important so the distributor can have direct access to the customer and once you get a lot of individual user data collected you can actually aggregate this user data and improve your sales and marketing increased sales agent effectiveness because you know which sales agents are selling products and really analyze your entire loan portfolio and repayment and then even zooming out even more this is something I got as really excited about is just creating this global database we'll be putting millions of customers on the map with a digital identity for the first time and having that kind of identity will allow a lot of these off-grid customers who might not have previously had bank accounts to actually have these sort of credit scores and access more traditional financing and this is really where we come full circle to just the work that we do with financial inclusion so I'm going to leave it there, thank you very much and I think it's time for Q&A I'll hand it back to Garth. Perfect thank you Wesley, I'm just stealing the ball back so thank you both, we have about 10 or 12 minutes left for Q&A from the audience I'm not sure if everyone can see on the bottom right of your screen I believe there should be a small Q&A tab if there are any questions for either of the presenters please feel free to send them along there and Yana and I will select a short list to relate to the presenters Yana I'm not sure if you have any particular questions in mind that you would like to ask but one that I would have for Nicole I think Leslie's presentation was a bit more in depth so Nicole I would love to learn a bit more about how payments are collected in your model whether that's through mobile mobile money or cash or some other methods and maybe why or why not why are you using certain methods over others yeah thank you Garth for that question and apologies I couldn't go into it I just wanted to make sure I was okay with time but very quickly short answer all of the above it just depends on the type of enterprise that we're working with and the what quote-unquote infrastructure they have at the time so we've had certain we've generally seen in urban areas for example mobile money or you know kind of cash light methods are more in use when it comes to paying loans back to banks paying loans back to MFI's in the rural areas generally we've seen our product partners or other different types of organizations that we work with i.e. NGOs or the like directly communicated with the entrepreneur and the bank and acting as kind of a go between or an intermediary kind of agent collecting via cash or collecting or working out an arrangement that helps in that regard kind of a short answer to that question but we've really seen that mobile money is very much in use as Leslie pointed out it is the case where a lot of those in India will be banked either now or in the future or connected to a financial institution of some sort but the payment collection methods still will be evolving in terms of how payments are collected, when they're collected through whom and the like. Thank you and there were some questions coming in but what sort of information is being collected from your clients in India? Is it purely financial or is there any sort of developmental impact measurement or things of that nature that you're also assessing? Yeah happy to answer that so generally a new landscape or a new community we inspect financial, social economic, all different types of indicators regarding selecting an entrepreneur as well as inspecting the community so we do look at you know, average household size, average income, you know list of occupations for the residents there any connections they may have to formal institutions of any type in terms of kind of social indicators we do look at you know education levels, percentage of those going to school kind of a summary of needs that the community needs in terms of basic services we take all this information and I'm happy to go kind of offline and present, you know, talk about the indicators more specifically you know, time permitting and we sit down with all of these kind of indicators, social, economic and financial as well as environmental relating to you know what kinds of technologies they use now Leslie kind of highlighted kerosene we encounter that quite regularly especially in a lot of the lighting enterprises that we help foster and we come up with an enterprise concept that will work or will kind of substitute and eliminate some of these and mitigate some of these kind of financial, social and environmental concerns that this community has so again, you know just relating back to my part of the presentation, our work is not only to formally integrate the poor into the economy but also kind of rid them of, you know, reliance on traditional fossil fuels and that, you know, clearly will keep them trapped in a cycle of dependency. Right, absolutely. And just to shift back to Leslie for one of the questions from the audience, Rachel had asked, Leslie what do you see as the largest challenges technical or otherwise currently facing pays you go to solar or maybe elaborating those challenges in the future that you foresee. Yeah, that's a great question. I'd say the single biggest challenge right now is just the financing that distributors need to have in place to finance the pays you go inventory as the end user is actually paying back the product. The financing burden is much larger, the larger systems that you go. Just to give you concrete examples here, a small portable solar light might have a payback period ranging from four to eight weeks. Larger solar home systems might be as long as one year or even up to three years depending on the size of the system. So someone's got to finance that product as these micro payments are being made over time. So I'd say that's sort of the largest universal barrier right now to pays you go solar. But it's also interesting and this is particularly because Angatha works in a B2B context. We work with a lot of different types of distributors. We're seeing a challenge for distributors who have traditionally been selling cash based solar products to then transition to selling pays you go products and it's a very different sort of operational challenge because you're actually running a credit facility within your business. You're turning into a micro finance institution and this is definitely a challenge for a lot of traditional solar distributors to make the switch operationally to support that kind of credit. What have you seen in solutions in that case is to add on to that question for a moment. What have you seen as solutions? Is that the manufacturer providing trainings or from Angatha or local NGO or CSO or? Yeah, we actually provide training to help with that barrier. Basically the training is simple things like making sure the distributor is running a helpline because now they're going to it's not just a one-time sale to a customer. They're going to be getting questions from customers over the lifetime of the payment period and then it's more complex things like thinking about cash flow for their business. How much inventory do they want to buy? When do they expect to get repaid from that pays you inventory? And when does that mean that they can purchase another container of products? Do they play the majority of that role with training distributors? Got it, okay. One more question from Emerson. Are there any past success stories or project examples where Pays You Go Energy has sounds like been the segue for more technology solutions with mobile money or other hardware technology? Thank you for that question. Yeah, so hopefully I'm answering this question correctly. This is a great example of how Pays You Go Solar has actually given reason to a lot of end-users to adopt mobile money whereas before they might not have really had a direct reason to use it. So distributors who are selling Pays You Go products are often rolling up end-user education about the use of mobile money for their training. So customers are actually using mobile money for the first time. And I think this is interesting because mobile money started basically as a way to send money from urban areas back to rural areas which was creating an actual transfer of cash such that there was a lot of cash being withdrawn from rural mobile money agents. With Pays You Go that was actually helping the mobile money system by putting cash into rural agents and sending that money back to urban areas where the distributor headquarter might be located. So it's sort of reversing the transfer or the flow of money in that system. Sort of an interesting side note there. And Yana, we have about two minutes left so feel free to take the mic or there are a few more questions coming in but we have about one or two minutes left. Sure. So actually I'm going to close the question to Nicole for an SDIDF if you could speak perhaps to the typical engagement period that you, the amount of time that you spend with an entrepreneur developing their business, providing training and essentially getting them to operate effectively. Do you have you experienced a certain pattern of time investment? Yeah, sure. Again, I say I give this answer pretty lightly because every single entrepreneur that we work with is different but typically we see about half a year to about 10 months in terms of engagement. If we work with the financial institution before and we're working with kind of a different branch, it really speeds up the process because of the fact that the financial institution is more willing to work with SDIDF because of the previous track record and history of partnership. Similarly, when we work with a new technology supplier or distributor company and we go to a new area with them, it kind of quickens up the pace. In terms of the entrepreneur it always helps when we're working with a local organization like a CSO or maybe just in a more informal community-based organization we have to work with at least in the Indian context we work with the village level kind of councils or the panchayats before to identify entrepreneurs and help identify kind of the needs of the community and that really, really helps in kind of streamlining all and making that kind of timeline a little more efficient or doable. Sorry, I want to make sure I've answered all parts of that question. Hopefully I did. Yeah, definitely I think that was a rich answer and that's actually brought us to the end of our time. I'd like to thank all of our presenters. Thank you and to our moderator, Gaurav Vaseline Akul. Thank you for taking the time to spend with us today and all of our attendees from around the world. Thank you for attending. For those of you who are seeking professional development hours the code is included on the slide visible now for you to submit along with your request for the PH certificate. If we didn't talk about your questions or you have additional questions for the presenters including job inquiries please feel free to send us an email at webinars at engineeringforchange.org and sign up to get information on upcoming webinars next month we'll be covering standards. So we look forward to catching you on the next webinar. Thank you to all and have a fantastic morning afternoon or evening wherever you may be. Take care.