Our Solution
“The quickest way to get out of poverty right now is to have one mobile telephone.”
After several years working with social entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa, Are, our Co-Founder and CPO, felt great frustration about the fact that the high momentum generated during entrepreneurial training events dropped all to fast, mostly due to minor practical issues. He sensed a need for a simple device that removed practical barriers, like accounting and book-keeping. It was with this in mind the idea of mPowerStation surfaced.
We are proud to present our device that, with its automated infrastucture, will contribute to local job creation in scale, and at the same time contribute to the shift towards renewable energy, as well as improve access to communications vital for business!
Why?
The mPowerStation was developed with the following fact in mind: There are over 650 million mobile users in Sub-Saharan Africa, while 60 percent of these users do not have easy access to electricity. In rural areas the main source for electricity is fossil generators. People therefore spend a lot of time walking to their nearest charging spot. This represents several problems:
People doesn’t get to use their mobile phones as often as they would have liked to. They are not able to apply their most important tool for communication, interaction and development.
The chargings are based on fossil energy.
People are spending a lot of time and energy to charge their phones.
We believe that we have developed a device that will contribute to solving these issues, while at the same time create jobs in rural areas in the global south.
Our Solution
We have developed an IoT-device, the mPowerStation, which makes it possible to attach solar panels and batteries from the local market and set up a charging station. It has a cpacity of charging 10 mobile devices at same time, and all the charging is monitored and payed for, with mobile money, through our mPowerStation App. The device, with its App, makes it possible for a person to become its own employer, by selling chargings. This person need no prior experience nor knowledge when it comes to business administration and economy - the App solves all of this.
With the mPowerStation we can build a distributed network of solar driven charging stations for mobile phones.
Today our App is integrated with M-PESA which is the largest mobile money provider in Kenya. We will integrate with further mobile money providers when needed and while scaling our solution.
Our solution is applicable in areas all off-grid rural areas, refugee camps and grid connected areas.
To be able to scale and distribute our solution we will need distribution partners which can contribute with identifying possible operators of charging stations, and who can help local operators with funding their mPowerStation. If you are a possible partner, provider of micro loans or an NGO who want to help distributing our solution, feel free to reach out.