PV financing is the way to reach rural majority:

The project is facilitating finance access to both PV suppliers and consumers sides for increased uptake of PV technology to the majority of off-grid households. The project conducted the PV stakeholder workshop on 3rd May 2005 in Mwanza to deliberate on appropriate PV consumer financing model to be tested and evaluated in Mwanza region. The workshop attracted stakeholders including private PV companies and financial institutions from Mwanza region.

Mobile phone charging by a PV system is now a profitable business in off-grid areas as a result of increased mobile phone companies and networks coverage countrywide.

The stakeholder’s workshop agreed on a PV credit model through SACCOs as appropriate and viable consumer financing option for marketing solar home systems. The project is liasing with Cooperative and Rural Development Bank (CRDB) to work out modalities of implementation.

In another development the project has identified a number of income generating PV projects to be demonstrated in off-grid areas from November 2005. These include applications such as mobile phone charging and TV/video shows businesses which are on increase due to recent increasing TV signal coverage and mobile phone network in the area.

Stakeholders who attended PV consumer financing workshop

Another application is barber shop business where currently small Chinese petrol generators are major source of energy for the businesses. Other applications such as water pumping, fish pond aeration and radio/video caste recording are earmarked. Initial PV system installation for these applications will serve as demonstration for transformation of rural business from the current fossil energy to clean source of energy at the same time generating income to business owners.

In the near future the already started initiatives will be combined with PV supplier financing in order to have effective supply chain at both supply and demand side of the product.

The idea of financing PV systems is to have prices of the systems spread over a period of time where end users can pay by installments reflected by their ability and willingness to pay for the systems. PV systems are appropriate for most of rural energy basic needs but high initial costs to acquire the systems have been the setback to wide scale utilization of the technology.