Startup for rural India

When his little boy was crying one night, the mother got up with only a candle because there was no electricity for light. When she reached for milk, she was bitten by a poisonous snake and died. Clearly, flicking on a light switch would have saved her life.

Such is daily life for 2.5 billion people around the world who are locked into situations with bad or no electricity. The centralized electricity infrastructure may not have not reached them or if it has, there are daily cuts or even worse — outages that last days or weeks.

This energy poverty is extremely limiting and stifles development. There is no power for lights so shops can stay open longer or neighbors can connect on their porches, no reliable power to consider investing in machinery to make daily tasks easier.

Small solar home systems (SHS) can solve this problem. In Bangladesh, Grameen Shakti sells 100, 000 systems a year to rural households. SHS can power multiple lights for morning and evening, a fan for cooling and comfort, and easily charge several mobile phones. These systems range between $150 to $300, depending on the type of lights and how long they will run. Not surprisingly, these price points keep most rural households away because they only make or less a day.

Simpa Networks, founded in 2010 by Paul Needham, Jacob Winiecki and Michael MacHarg, is attempting to make these systems not only affordable by rural households, but also investible by commercial capital.

Simpa added a meter with a keypad and display to every SHS. Customers can purchase a Simpa SHS packaged with finance. After a small down payment, customers pay for energy days. When they pay, they enter a code on the keypad, which, if valid, gives the customers energy for as many days as they have paid for. If an invalid code or no code is entered, the meter turns off and the system stops generating electricity. Simpa's software generates unique codes for every system, so Simpa can track when and if each product is paid.