Boosting Impact at the Base of the Pyramid: Enhancing the Uptake of Sustainable Energy

Adoption of existing green solutions at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) remains a challenge due to the expensive upfront investments, the lack of infrastructure in remote areas, but also due to a lack of awareness and trust in new technologies, and due to the lack of technical knowledge and skills for the upkeep of those innovative products. Social and environmental small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) offer one concrete means of addressing these issues, primarily because they are specialists in understanding local challenges and needs and with their extended local networks have the ability to reach the last-mile beneficiaries. By introducing new products, services and models that serve social needs and create new social relationships, they are able to maximise the uptake of green solutions in the long term. While there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to clean energy distribution or adoption, the paper looks at the case of Solar Sister in Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria, to highlight how SMMEs can introduce innovative social structures through a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach. Through their unique women-to-women network and dedicated women empowerment, the enterprise offers a wide range of high quality clean energy products with a long life-cycle, and has created an innovative value chain that works for those at the base of the pyramid by positioning themselves close to their markets, tailoring innovation to social needs, mitigating high costs through micro-entrepreneurship and by growing networks and expertise through multi-stakeholder partnerships. Subsequently, they have increased local awareness, trust and ownership in the innovative products, and succeeded in large scale dissemination of the new technologies at the BoP.