Nuru – Beyond Solar
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| The Nuru Light is pedal-powered © John Briggs |
There is more to modern off-grid lighting than solar lamps. While most (19) of Lighting Africa supported products are solar portable lanterns, one new product has just joined the program and introduced an innovative dynamo powered technology.
The Nuru Light is a modular light, which is pedal-powered – in other words, charged by cycling. Customers who purchase a Nuru Light for 4-6 USD come to charge it weekly at their local shop, where the retailer will charge them around 0.20 USD for 20 minutes of gentle pedaling. This is enough for a full charge and approximately 28 hours of quality light.
This new technology and business model opens new avenues for Lighting Africa to make quality, affordable light accessible to low income households and SMEs in Africa.
The Nuru Light was designed specifically for base of the pyramid (BoP) markets in rural Africa. Nuru spent a year in the field in Rwanda surveying over 600 households, most of whom were using kerosene for lighting. They found out that over 90% of their potential customers work in agriculture, earn less than 2 USD a day, and are unable to meet the upfront costs of renewable energy products.
Nuru then developed a low up-front cost product, requiring small recurring payments for charging – just as telecom companies sell low cost phones and then airtime. Consumers, who would previously spend around 0.20 USD a day on dangerous, polluting and expensive kerosene, can now recoup the cost of a 4-6USD lamp and its weekly charging in four to five weeks.
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| The Nuru Light System © Michelle Ewing |
Cost was not the only aspect that Nuru took into account when developing the light system: consumer preferences also informed the design. Each LED light can be used individually in a variety of ways, such as a headlamp, worn around the neck, hung from the ceiling, resting on a flat surface of bottle mounted, or be combined with other Nuru LED units. Similar to most of the Lighting Africa supported products, the Nuru Light System can also be used to charge a cell phone, and even a radio.
This new technology for clean off-grid lighting also requires a different business model from the solar lanterns that Lighting Africa is supporting. Consumers do not charge the Nuru Light themselves at home (as they might with solar charged lamps), but instead customers go to a local retailer (“entrepreneur”) to recharge their lights.
In this business model, Nuru is distributing its lamps through a network of village level entrepreneurs who operate microfranchises. These entrepreneurs sell the lamps and recharge them, using the Nuru POWERCycle. Nuru recruits these entrepreneurs from local cooperatives and trains them in using the POWERCycle, then provides them with a loan of lights from one of their microfinance partners. In addition to creating the world’s first commercially available pedal generator, Nuru has also developed POWERGrid, a plug-in charging system for those with grid-connections, and POWERSolar, a solar panel that can charge up to five lights at once.
The Nuru Light is already in use in several districts of Rwanda; it is coming soon to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
