The urgency of the local weather disaster is felt throughout sub-Saharan Africa. As droughts and floods turn out to be extra frequent and extreme, crops fail and conventional rain-fed agriculture is changing into more and more unreliable.
Irrigation might maintain the important thing for farmers looking for to make sure meals safety for his or her households and to derive an earnings from their harvests. Nevertheless, simply 4% to six% of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultivated land is presently irrigated, based on British suppose tank ODI. Irrigation is essentially concentrated in additional developed African international locations and with large-scale business farmers.
If rolled out at scale, solar-powered irrigation techniques maintain large potential. They work for smallholder farmers, who account for 80% of sub-Saharan Africa’s farms, based on the UN Meals and Agriculture Group. However in addition they displace costly and polluting diesel pumps and may, if managed appropriately, contribute to efforts to handle scarce water sources effectively for the long run.
Battery choice
Drip irrigation can goal water the place it’s most wanted and battery vitality storage allows farmers to water crops through the night, minimizing loss to evaporation. Farmers can even use techniques to cost small gadgets equivalent to cellphones, enabling them to entry correct climate forecasts and agronomy recommendation in actual time.
With large-scale entry to irrigation we might see a rise within the productiveness and profitability of land throughout sub-Saharan Africa, enabling farmers to maneuver past subsistence, aggregating their crops to promote to bigger markets. A current article within the Monetary Occasions famous that Africa has 60% of the world’s obtainable arable land and, with a rising inhabitants, has the labor wanted to farm it. With assist round land possession, seed choice, soil well being, fertilizers, entry to finance, and, crucially, water, Africa has the potential to not solely feed its personal inhabitants however to export produce to assist international meals safety, said the FT.
As I see it, there are three key challenges to rolling out solar-powered irrigation pumps on the scale required to satisfy farmers’ wants and on the tempo demanded by the escalating local weather disaster.
Fee points
Mainly, there’s the difficulty of affordability. Farmers want to have the ability to pay the upfront price of a solar-powered irrigation system and to pay all through its use. In comparison with the diesel-fueled irrigation pumps many farmers use at this time, the whole lifetime price of photo voltaic powered irrigation techniques might be considerably decrease. We estimate farmers can save 40% to 60% on irrigation prices.
As we see throughout the off-grid photo voltaic sector, adopting a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) strategy – or, in our case, pay-as-you-grow – has the good thing about permitting farmers to pay for his or her techniques over time, as their earnings will increase on account of higher harvests.
The status of this mannequin has been tainted, nevertheless, by means of sharp promoting practices designed to power prospects to join techniques no matter affordability. To keep away from this, coaching is essential and it’s essential to separate gross sales and credit score groups, aligning key efficiency indicators and compensation to make sure that there’s a balanced strategy between buyer acquisition and portfolio well being. It is usually crucial that gross sales brokers receives a commission their fee over time in order that they’re incentivized to assist display screen potential purchasers.
Pump prices
It is usually vital to construction cost plans based on buyer wants, utilizing a wide range of strategies to raised perceive their circumstances, together with ID verification and cross checking a possible prospects’ credit score historical past by way of the Credit score Reference Bureau. We additionally use a proprietary credit-scoring algorithm.
Even with acceptable pre-sales care, there’s all the time a threat that prospects could fall behind on funds. Devoted relationship managers with superior coaching and enterprise intelligence are essential in offering after gross sales assist, monitoring buyer accounts, and offering personalised assist ought to they establish any early indicators of concern. As a final resort, having the technical functionality to repossess techniques helps create lending controls.
Applicable cost plans are vital however so too is preserving the upfront price of photo voltaic pumps low for purchasers and, to this finish, SunCulture is pioneering using carbon revenues. We’re the primary African photo voltaic water pump firm to obtain certification from Washington-based sustainability requirements group Verra. SunCulture believes that this route will turn out to be an more and more established income for irrigation, nature-based options, and initiatives throughout the broader local weather adaptation sector. For that shift to occur, somebody has to go first.
Shifting on from affordability, upkeep is the following key problem, notably in distant and rural areas the place farms might be laborious to succeed in and the provision of educated technicians is restricted. By managing the lifecycle of pumps from design via manufacture, finance, set up, and upkeep, corporations can work with farmers to make sure that pumps are capable of proceed to operate in typically difficult native circumstances, season after season.
Upkeep considerations
Web-of-things (IoT)-enabled expertise allows educated groups to observe pump efficiency and conduct upkeep remotely. That is complemented by strategically situated gross sales and repair facilities and a distributed workforce of subject engineers capable of quickly reply to upkeep points, broaden native capability and reduce downtime for farmers reliant on irrigation for profitable harvests.
Once more, solar-powered irrigation has a bonus over diesel pumps in that their gasoline supply is plentiful and domestically obtainable. Fewer transferring elements additionally make solar-powered irrigation techniques much less liable to interrupt down than their diesel counterparts.
Lastly, there’s the difficulty of attracting enough finance to make sure that solar-powered irrigation companies can turn out to be worthwhile, broaden their portfolios, and broaden into new jurisdictions. Up to now, this has been a pinch level the place smaller off-grid vitality and irrigation corporations have failed to draw enough finance and so have gone out of enterprise, with prospects being let down.
At SunCulture, we now have labored to handle this by looking for to lift enough funds for our formidable scale-up program which can place us effectively to maximise and diversify our income streams throughout a number of international locations and lots of of 1000’s of consumers. In that mild, we just lately introduced the closure of an oversubscribed $27.5 million sequence B funding spherical. SunCulture is fortunate to have a various vary of recent buyers, together with Reed Hastings, InfraCo Africa Restricted, Acumen Fund, the Schmidt Household Basis, and others.
The challenges are actual and complicated however we can not afford to attend for the right mannequin. Farmers want options now and we’re dedicated to delivering for them.
In regards to the creator: Samir Ibrahim is CEO and co-founder of SunCulture.
The views and opinions expressed on this article are the creator’s personal, and don’t essentially replicate these held by pv journal.
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