Bonus: Game Changers, Part 3

and global resources. We'll get a peek behind the curtains of their factory floors here of the sometimes surprising origins of their ideas, and be introduced to a potentially greener tomorrow in this episode micro Grids and micro Economies. Currently, I believe the households which have got power in Kenya's approblemly about so there is another we just got no power at all. Their household is indicated largely desa in the rural areas. That's zachary Io, a man who knows

about power and electricity. As a former executive at the National Power Company, he helped expand Kenya's electricity access from eighteen percent of the population in two thousand ten to sixty, the highest in mainland East Africa. But born and raised in rural Kenya, he also experienced the country is often inadequate access to electricity early in life. The first time I had power in my in my village was in the year nineteen. Before that, there was no power at all,

completely set up the starts of living. Why extremely very very low because the communication was zero. But the country is not alone in its struggles. About six fifty million people in Africa live without access to power and a continent marred by inequality and poverty. This raises an uncomfortable question, how do you bring people out of extreme poverty without wrecking the climate in the process. Conventional wisdom says it will require the burning of enough fossil fuels to counsel

out any progress that developed world makes on emissions. But in rural Kenya, a small experiment is underway aiming to see if it's possible to have the economic uplift without the environmental catastrophe. It's spearheaded by power Hive, a privately licensed utility company where Ako is currently the executive chairman. Here let's go my arms crossed, or does it okay okay. Arriving in Africa in two thousand eight, Power Hive CEO and founder Chris Horner found a challenge enginge landscape rife

with potential. Things have not really moved very much in the last hundred years, with the exception of course, of mobile phones and mobile money and things like this. So what's happening not only in Kesey and other parts of Kenya, but all over Africa and other parts of the world. This is a huge gap in terms of those that have electricity and those that don't. Here in Kisy, Horner found the perfect circumstances to try out his new solutions.

Power Hive Senior business manager Laura Kiplegat explains, well, we went to Kesi because we were looking for a community UM that is on the fringe of the grid like most rural communities in Kenya, but did have the population density to make sense for us as a business. And Kis is a happy medium. You know, they have good son, good people who are willing, you know to sign onto the project um but they it had all the components that we needed, you know, to make our business work

that business. Power Hive currently manages around twenty five micro grids in the Kisi region, grids that operate on solar power stored in batteries ideal for the sunny climate. These mini grids are power systems that supply enough electricity for a small community. Schools and homes get electric light and internet service. Agricultural labor like maize milling, doesn't have to

be done by hand anymore. Electric pressure cookers eliminate the need to chop down trees or burn charcoal to make meals. All of these things raise the standard of living and relieve the environment. But there's one big problem. Our typical communities are generally subsistence farming. Most of them are not formally employed. Most of them don't have formal education or have not completed anything really beyond primary education UM and are really the bottom of the pyramid in the economy.

When we first came into too Kenya and into Keys, we quickly realized that our consumers are too poor to pay for energy power. Hive solution is as simple as their solar panels. Create a microeconomy to bolster local businesses. So we've introduced electric vehicles. We've introduced electric milling machines to to to provide a better, lower cost solution for milling. Yeah. But the starkest example of this could be found in Poko Poa Power Hives ambitious poultry farming initiative. Most of

our communities are subsistence farmers. These are people who are already wearing chicken, but are limited by the capital you know UM issue, and are limited by exposure and understanding of how to to scale a poultry business. So we developed a program to bring commercial poultry farming to our communities, create an income for for our communities, and then also create a good energy customer for us as a business.

So we set up CUCA Poa UM in sort of joint partnership with local corporatives whose members are all power hive customers UM. We tend to have groups of ten typically they're all women UM or at least about women

across our twenty brewderhouses. Then the corporative bringing the capital to build the infrastructure, so they'll build a brooder house, they'll buy all the equipment necessary UM, which is the heating lamps, the lighting lamps, UM feeder trays, UM and water troughs, and then power Hive brings in the chicks. We provide batinary services and feed, and then we also help help them secure off takers for the poultry at

the end of the cycle. It's a virtuous cycle. For power Hive, they give their customers the money and guidance to start businesses that use their electricity, and then a portion of the income from those businesses pays for the electricity. So the poultry business is great because it provides food security, but it's a it's a commodity that can actually help generate cash and bring cash into these communities that basically

severely lack cash. And as an investor, you know, that's something that we really focus on because you know, we want to make a return on investment. We also in order to do that, we really have to invest in the communities in which we work, uplifting our customers to

become better customers, happier, healthier customers. Most most subsistence farmers will keep about fifteen to twenty UM kanyegee chicken, which is like a free range chicken um and these would mature between eight two year eight months to two years,

depending on the species. UM. When you look at the yield, you know of commercially grown chicken, you're producing chickens and selling those in six weeks, so this is exponentially increasing the potential for for income for all these communities are involved. Power Hive currently operates on a all scale, but Laura believes that the domino effect could be substantial for both

the company and the community. Well. Statistics show with women who are engaged in business and are able to control their income, which they're able to through informal cooperatives, women tend to invest more in business, they tend to invest more in in education, and that has a huge knock on effect in their communities. UM. Typically you'll also find the community members who do see UM or are exposed to successful businesses get inspired to do that themselves, you know.

So you'll have people on some of our grids UM starting barbershops, UM, people starting maybe smaller versions of UM poultry farms UM which they can afford. And all of that wouldn't have happened if they hadn't had the exposure or understood how it can be done or that it

can be done. There's one of our customers who was involved in one of the first Cucupoa projects and she went on to start her own brooder and I think she's producing herself three thousand chicken um, and that's just off of the back of the experience that she gained on Cucaca. And as far as Chris is concerned, there might not be a more powerful way to build sustainable power grids in Kenya and Africa in general than by

solar micro grids. Twenty years ago, the price per kill a lot of a solar panel was about six dollars. Now it's twenty cents. History has shown us that you know, as recently as the nineteen sixties and parts of the UK, there was no electricity in these villages, right, The same same exact sort of customer profiles existed then that we're seeing now. So it's just so we have to have a bit of patience, we have to have a bit

of vision. But in order to really accelerate this adoption of distributed energy and solar and the sort of businesses that we're looking at, we really need to make it economic.

We need to make it so that the local Kenyan pension funds and other other funds will invest in these types of businesses, so that these these grids, in this infrastructure, which by a way, it's much more advanced and better than any of the infrastructure we even have in the United States is now being brought here is something that is truly bankable. So yes, they've been left in the dark for the last you know, fifty years, longer than their counterparts in the UK, some of them. But the

benefit is they have the best technology now. They have the solar lithium ion batteries and all these other technologies that we've put in place that will stand the test of time and have been built to last. It's opened up a huge opportunity in Africa to deliver energy and energy storage and this whole grid infrastructure, an ecosystem that we're creating in a much lower cost way and in a way that actually is going to create a long term um distributed energy system that is actually going to

serve Africa for generations. This episode of Game Changers was produced by Magnus Hendrikson and presented by me Matt Goldman. It was based on a video report produced by myself and Alan Jeffreys. For a visual experience of Game Changers, check out our videos at Bloomberg dot com slash Green. Francesca Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. See you next time.