From the Field

Post from Caroline Mauldin, MIT SEID

It’s a particularly warm day in Chanika, Tanzania.  I’m standing outside of an EGG-energy “station”—a simple storefront boasting an orange sign that bears the company’s logo.  A young boy, maybe 12 or 13, glides up on his bicycle with a bundle secured tightly to the handlebars.  Taking the bundle, he walks through EGG’s open door and sits down in front of the station’s lone desk.  He is here  to swap his family’s battery, a new source of energy for homes and businesses living off of Tanzania’s utility-scale grid.

I’m traveling with a classmate for two weeks, wrapping up a semester-long project with EGG through MIT Sloan’s Entrepreneurs for International Development (SEID) club.  Along with two other classmates, who weren’t able to join us on the ground, we worked with EGG’s management team to review and refine the company’s sales process.  After three years in operation, EGG is cognizant of the need to ramp up their sales and institute a structured training and development program for their growing sales staff.

As with any start-up, sales are the backbone of growth and profitability.  Without an increasing customer base, companies do not live long past their 3^rd or 4^th birthdays.  For EGG, sales have proved challenging for many reasons, both expected and unexpected.

Among the expected: doing business in semi-urban and rural areas around Tanzanian’s dispersed geography is simply time-consuming.  Roads are unreliable and the distance between villages is significant.  Then there’s the matter of convincing new prospects that EGG’s products are better than their existing electricity solutions (typically kerosene for lighting), and that they should spend their spare shillings on such a seemingly grand investment.

Once EGG establishes a foothold in one area, customers inevitably follow, but rarely at a pace that promises scale—at least not yet.  The challenge, unexpected or not, is to tap into the social networks of existing customers, effectively turning them into spokespeople for EGG’s products.  Whether through social, business or religious circles, the expectation is that an EGG client, who has already embraced and experienced the advantages of battery or solar-powered energy, can bring others to the light, so to speak.

EGG has started down this path by aggressively increasing the number of “EGG Distributors” or independent agents in key villages and towns.  Typically the proprietors of small shops or kiosks (“duka” in Swahili), EGG agents simply allot shelf space to EGG batteries, serving as a swap spot for clients in the area.  As EGG expands this “distributor” or agent network, so too will the company’s footprint—and its potential for long-term sustainability.

After spending two weeks between the office in Dar es Salaam and their remote stations, our team developed a workshop for EGG’s staff.  Our goal was to energize the team as much as to impart some of that golden b-school wisdom recently absorbed in our Cambridge classrooms.  Translated into Swahili, we covered the elements of a successful pitch, the “funnel” of customer acquisition, and the four P’s of effective marketing.  But mostly, we got everyone talking (also in Swahili) about what was working and what wasn’t quite there yet.  Like any thoughtful start-up, EGG’s success is due in part to its ability to assess and iterate on its sales model.  For two days, EGG’s headquarters were filled with just that—the chatter and real-time iteration of a team committed to bringing affordable power to off-grid families and business.

As the company expands their distributor network and continues to train their staff, EGG will have plenty to celebrate when their 4^th birthday rolls around.

We strive to offer our customers the best of the best. In fact, it’s a driving factor behind one of our core values: reliability. In addition to maintaining excellent customer service, we want to reduce the frequency that a customer needs to access that service by improving our systems technically.

We’ve primarily focused on establishing systems to support our battery technology. Charge controllers at our installations will extend the lifespan of our batteries and make their behavior more predictable. Now that we have a handle on how to protect our batteries in the field (lots of TLC and better swap tracking), we can take a deep dive into modifying other elements in our product offerings.

We source from both local and foreign suppliers to fulfill one of our other core values: accessibility (our third value is service). We think that selling affordable and dependable products is the best way to reach the majority of Tanzanians. Locally-sourced materials don’t always satisfy these standards, but sometimes they’re much better. We offer two examples below: light bulbs and frames.

Our first priority in sourcing light bulbs is energy demand: we want our batteries to last up to a week under normal conditions. This means that the light bulbs need to be very efficient and draw as little power out of our systems as possible. Although priced a bit higher than CFLs, LEDs fit our standards for accessibility and reliability. Manufacturers in China sent sample bulbs to us three months ago, and we’ve been testing the products in our office to see how they operate with our other equipment. We left the bulbs on day and night, a little “survival of the fittest” test, but the bulbs held up for the entire summer. Our next step was to poll customers at our stations to see which bulb they preferred. Finally we tested the illumination and diffusion of light in on-site applications. The winner? Best in show: the people’s choice bulb turned out to be the technical frontrunner, too. Match point!

The finalists: The 4th bulb on the shelf is the newest member of the EGG-energy team.

Simultaneously we redesigned the frames that attach the solar panels to the roof (this is like the Olympics, multiple events happening at the same time). Previously, we sent the dimensions to a local Tanzanian metalworker to have them made. However, we have panels of different sizes so this was a bit inefficient. How do we improve this process? Using more adaptable materials that our technicians can put together on-site. We purchase simple materials from local metalworkers and have them cut pieces to standard lengths suitable for our panels and for the typical roof construction of our customers. Treating metal with a rust-proof coating and standardizing our sealant methods ensures that this new design takes the gold, satisfying our customers for the lifetime of the system. The technicians are especially excited about the new frames because they are easier to adjust and can adapt to roofs of different pitches.

Our first installation using the new frame.

Reliable and accessible products are the best way to serve our customers. Although the London Olympics have come to a close (Tanzania wasn’t able to bring any medals home this year), EGG-energy will keep performing trials to find new ways to improve our track records. Umeme kwa maisha bora!

On behalf of the student-run non-profit Planete d’Entrepreneurs, a team of three French students from HEC Business School (Jean-Baptiste Lagier, Astrid Vitoux and Marianne Rauche) joined us on June 11^th to embark on an ambitious mission: help us better understand our customers and evaluate the social impact that EGG-energy has had to date.

How to accomplish such a feat in just six weeks of time? By making a lot of trips to the field, of course.

The trio interviewed currently active customers, inactive customers and households without EGG-energy systems (yet!), whose responses were used to establish a baseline. The questionnaire was designed to gather quantitative metrics regarding usage, swapping and spending on other energy sources as well as information on qualitative metrics addressing employment, health and education. The group, accompanied by a Swahili translator, usually traveled to the homes of our users to administer the survey and see the system in action, ensuring that they received honest responses from customers. While the team’s preferred mode of transport was dalladalla (minibus) and foot, taxis and motorbikes were utilized on occasion.

Over five weeks, the team talked to over 100 people at our four sites (Msanga, Iringa, Mbagala and Chanika). With this substantial sample, the analysis that they’ll perform will give the company great insight into the behaviors and preferences of our customers: How much kerosene is EGG-energy’s service displacing? What modifications would make the service more convenient? Are our prices appropriate for our users? What other products should we offer? How is the quality of our service perceived? How can we improve our operations? The group will present their findings to EGG-energy management this week, who will then be able to refine EGG’s strategy to better meet the need of the population that we want to serve. After that, our French friends will return to Paris with the satisfaction of having done a fantastic job: “Mission accomplie!”

May has been a month of swaps, which is quite fitting, given the nature of our business.

We swapped the valuable contributions of Anne and Jodie (thank you to both of them for their excellent insights and development of our systems and processes) for the veteran knowledge of Yi Wang (welcome back!) and rookie Kirsten Hagfors (authoring this blog post). Sophia swapped time in the office for time at home, preparing for the arrival of her first child. We wish her the best.

We swapped batteries without discharge controls for those with them. The recent delivery of this long sought solution to inadequately deep discharge of the batteries that we rent out to our customers will help extend the lifetime of our inventory and reduce the frequency at which our customers need to exchange devices for newly charged ones.

We swapped our newest EGG-team addition, rural African community expert Joel Lagoutte sent by BlueEnergy (BE) to identify community sites where we could collaborate with BE to set up electricity generation capacities that would be large enough to power productive uses, between fieldwork in Iringa and brainstorming sessions in Dar es Salaam.

We swapped CEO Jamie Yang between conferences, spreading information about the current business and future endeavors of EGG.

And, most importantly, we continued to swap unreliable and expensive traditional lighting sources for consistent and cost-effective lighting solutions, listening to the consumer feedback that our end-users provide so as to drive our mission forward. How can we make swapping more convenient? What modifications in our current operations will help attract new customers, or meet current customer demands better?

One example of a more flexible and less-costly lighting solution is a solar lantern. While our home lighting systems offer the most reliable and efficient way for users to illuminate their households, a solar lantern has lower upfront costs and can be used both within and outside of the house. Reports indicate that increasing the hours of study time for children or enabling parents to prepare a meal by the light of a pollutant-free lantern improves the livelihoods of users.(1)

Through our initial research of solar lantern business opportunities, we identified Greenlight Planet as a manufacturer of a durable and inexpensive solar-powered lantern. The first chance to try these out in the field came to us through Songas, a Tanzanian natural gas company. Songas purchased several Sun King Pro solar lanterns to be distributed to a community of people that had been displaced from their village following a flood. We traveled to a school 15 km outside of the Dar es Salaam city center to deliver the lanterns to the eldest child in each displaced family that had been identified by Songas. Our staff organized the distribution process and demonstrated the proper use and maintenance of the lanterns. It was an exciting and rewarding application of our potential product offerings. We’ll be sure to check in with the community to see how the lanterns are performing and used. Although Greenlight Planet offers a generous warranty on their products, we don’t foresee having to take advantage of this service.

And now we swap May for June, looking forward to the opportunities we’ll be pursuing during this cool and dry season.

Representatives from Songas, Mabwe Pande Primary School and High School and EGG-energy present the solar-charged lanterns.

Eager recipients!

Our field team tells students about the Sun King solar-charged lanterns and demonstrates how to operate and use them.