Reflections on My Visit with Solar Sister in Kenya
by Joan Johnson-Freese
In 2008 American Katherine Lucey, a former Wall Street banker specializing in energy, met Rebecca, a rural farmer in Uganda. Rebecca was using a solar lamp to light her chicken coop. More light meant more eggs, which meant more profit and, Rebecca explained, subsequently, a better future for her family. The relationship between women’s entrepreneurship and energy sparked an idea with Katherine that two years later became the Solar Sister pilot project: recruiting women in rural areas to sell clean energy products to enrich women’s individual lives, their families, and their communities.
Today, there are 11,000 Solar Sister Entrepreneurs (SSEs) in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya. They live in rural areas where electricity is largely unavailable, and less than 10% of them have smartphones. Most are married, and support from their husbands to join Solar Sister is fairly common once the husbands see the benefit to the family. Some of the younger SSEs already have more than one child. Some are second, third, or even fourth wives. Some are widowed or unmarried. Having their own source of income empowers them to make choices for themselves and their children, often otherwise unavailable, potentially including leaving an abusive situation.
Over 300 million African women have no reliable power in their homes; they rely on candles, kerosene, and batteries for light and power. Breathing kerosene smoke is unhealthy, and kerosene products are a fire hazard. Thanks to Solar Sister, 5 million people have been reached with clean energy products, and $50 million in economic benefits have been generated in off-grid communities. As a result, over 1.7 metric tons of C02e emissions have been mitigated. The work of Solar Sister contributes to 9 of the 17 sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015.
I had the opportunity to spend time in Kenya with Solar Sister in October 2024. Their energy, enthusiasm, and commitment were immediately obvious and contagious. At the first training session I attended, an experienced SSE, Ruth, led the trainees in singing to kick off the meeting. The chorus was especially rousing: Solar Sisters bring light, Solar Sisters bring hope, Solar Sisters bring opportunity for African women. Solar Sister trains and provides ongoing support for the women, enabling entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses in their community.
The business model focuses on the SSEs seeing themselves as their own boss and able to build their business according to their own goals rather than working for someone else. Most women have access to small amounts of money to invest in their businesses at some point during the year through selling agricultural products. Initially, the SSEs sold small, solar-powered lights. Their product line has expanded to include clean cookstoves and small solar-powered home lighting systems. In 2023, Solar Sister’s survey revealed that 33% of entrepreneurs went on to develop additional businesses in other sectors by leveraging the additional income as well as the training provided by Solar Sister.
But Solar Sister is a social enterprise focused on women’s empowerment, economic development, and clean, sustainable energy. Franchises have long been known to hold benefits for entrepreneurs as they are built on proven business models, offer an established brand recognition, ongoing training and support systems, and hence the reduced risk of failure. Solar Sister carefully builds a sense of community among its SSEs, and they wear their bright orange tee-shirts with pride. But this hybrid model is not without challenges, challenges that others might learn from, and its implementation reinforces that idea that even with a strong model, one size fits one, not all. Consideration of different rural and urban challenges Solar Sister has encountered, as well as the vital role of the Business Development Associates (BDA) in the organization, is illustrative.
Rural Challenges
Solar Sister’s origins are with off-grid communities. But those communities can be very different. At another October 2024 training session near Bomet in western Kenya, the Solar Sister BDA who meets monthly with the SSEs – some of whom came from as far as 27 kilometers away on foot or hitching a ride on the back of a motorbike or truck, to attend the meeting – began talking about the importance of setting goals. Though several SSEs spoke English, the group mainly worked in Swahili. Some women had children with them. The group had been working together for over a year, had already covered basic sales and marketing principles, and was now focused on growing their businesses.
Most of the women were farmers who supplemented her income through Solar Sister. One woman, Pauline, said she wanted to expand her egg business by increasing the number of chickens she had from 20 to 200 within a year. The BDA used a whiteboard, and the group then worked through the calculations of how many lamps she would have to sell to reach the amount of capital needed to buy 180 more chickens. The women took copious notes in small notebooks. As each woman stated her goal, the group did similar calculations with the BDA, who worked to drive home the importance of building the business rather than spending the capital.
Where and how the women sold their products varied. Pauline sold her lamps at markets. She wished for a table and umbrella that she could set up, so she could sell even in inclement weather. A teacher sold her lamps at her rural school to the parents of students who wanted their children to be able to study longer at night without using unhealthy and dangerous kerosene lamps indoors. Judy, as business savvy and ambitious as any Harvard MBA graduate and active on Tik Tok, had her own shop on a dusty road about a mile away – a small stall in a row of similar stalls – that she walked to daily. She sold not just lamps, but clothes and accessories, and wanted more stock. She explained that if the shop next to her had 20 solar lamps and she had only two, the other merchant would be perceived as the more “serious” merchant. The women individually and communally exemplified both grit and determination.
The Maasai Mara is some 160 kilometers south of Bomet. Outside the National Park and deep into the interior of Maasai land there is another Solar Sister community. At their monthly meeting the women, with their beautiful beaded jewelry and their bright orange Solar Sister tee-shirts, also worked on goals with their BDA. Their goals were, again, varied. One woman said she dreamed of buying a cupboard to hold kitchenware in her house. An older woman said her goal was to earn enough money to visit her daughter and two grandchildren in Tanzania. Another wanted to go back to school.
At this meeting, though, there was no whiteboard. The BDA worked only orally with them as many women at the meeting were illiterate. Most spoke Swahili, though some only spoke the Maasai language. One spoke English. Again, some mothers had children with them. The women translated for each other when needed. Many sold their lamps at markets or carried them from village to village to sell.
The women talked about how important it was to them to feel part of something bigger than just their group. Knowing that there were other women, not just in Kenya but in Tanzania and Nigeria as well, who were selling products and wearing the distinctive Solar Sister orange tee-shirt captivated them.
SSEs universally speak to the advantages they feel they can offer their customers. Though some competitor prices are cheaper and offer advantages like credit, the SSEs give their customers a receipt, a warranty and support them if anything goes wrong. They build trust with their customers and say that their customers are loyal to them. Additionally, because the women are selling – and repairing – technology, their status in the community often gets a boost. They become more empowered socially as well as economically.
Some challenges faced by the Solar Sister communities in western Kenya – transportation, weather and time to work on their business – are common to all SSEs. Some are community specific, like literacy. Some involve competitive marketing. Judy said she was unable to sell many cookstoves in her store because a competitor was giving away a tee-shirt with each cook stove purchased – an incentive she couldn’t offer. If you expand the Kenya experience to rural Tanzania and Nigeria, each with similar and different challenges, and need for model and institutional flexibility, initiative and perseverance is clear.
Urban Challenges
In 2022, Solar Sister, Inc. merged with LivelyHoods Kenya. Launched in 2011, LivelyHoods focused on training and employing disadvantaged women and at-risk youth in Kenyan slums, by training them to sell clean energy – primarily clean cookstoves and solar lights in hard-to-reach communities. Given their similar organizational goals, the merger expanded the Kenyan market and for Solar Sister, brought them into underserved urban areas for the first time.
Consequently, an apprentice program was launched in Nairobi. The intent is to work with apprentices for three months – mornings, five days a week – to allow the apprentices time to learn the model and decide if they felt being an SSE was right for them. Alex, a former beneficiary of the LivelyHoods program, was enthusiastic and engaged with the apprentices at a Nairobi training session, passing on to them the hope for a better future that he had personally experienced. While men have not been excluded from being SSEs in the past, women have numerically prevailed by significant margins as per the company’s mission to achieve gender equity in last-mile communities.
Because electricity is largely available in Nairobi, cookstoves are the primary product SSEs sell. The cookstoves are marketed as saving buyers time, money and fuel, specifically money spent on charcoal and kerosene. Apprentices are taught how to explain to consumers how they save money: what they spend monthly and yearly on charcoal and kerosene, versus the investment in clean energy that doesn’t need kerosene and only far less coal. Sometimes, however, that can still be a hard sell if individuals feel they can only afford short-term costs rather than long-term benefits at a higher initial investment.
Some SSEs work from tables, many set up in front of a bank chain Solar Sister has worked out an arrangement with. Some go to markets and sell there. Many cold call customers, walking up and down streets carrying their products, talking to every person who will listen. Cold calling in urban areas introduces unique marketing challenges and opportunities that aren’t as pressing when working in rural areas. Urban marketing requires building a deeper customer database, more follow-up with customers who showed initial interest, and encouraging referrals. These marketing efforts not only boost sales but also motivate the SSEs to pursue their personal business goals.
Business Development Associates
A recent recruitment ad on the Solar Sister website for BDAs in Kenya stated their job description, responsibilities and criteria for BDAs.
“Solar Sister Kenya is seeking dynamic candidates for Business Development Associate Trainee positions who will be responsible for the recruitment, training, mentorship, and support of Solar Sister Entrepreneurs in the above-mentioned regions.
The Business Development Associate Trainee will oversee, support, and guide the Solar Sister Entrepreneurs in growing and developing their small business or business ventures to bring clean energy to their communities.
Our ideal candidate will bring a commitment to Solar Sister’s mission of creating energy access for everyone, everywhere. The candidate will be able to work independently, have a strong background in training, coaching, and mentoring, have strong past experience in business and Sales/marketing, and have a solid understanding of coaching principles related to an entrepreneurial venture. Strong communication and interpersonal skills are required.“
The importance of the BDA and their being able to tailor the Solar Sister model to their individual groups cannot be overstated, as the examples from Bomet and Maasai Mara Sisterhood Groups exemplify. BDAs, salaried employees, are individuals who can make or break new recruits, growing entrepreneurs, and the group overall.
Where and when appropriate, BDAs work with the SSEs about digital literacy and the importance of data in building their businesses. For maximum effectiveness, however, smartphones are needed. Earnings have been shown to be 80% higher for those SEEs who own smartphones and are digitally literate, than those who do not. Wish lists from SSEs are long and varied: bicycles to make travel easier and allow them to travel further to sell their products; smartphones; and banners, tables and umbrellas for use at markets.
In many organizations, the income of regional managers – regional managers loosely paralleling BDAs – is based on or supplemented by bonuses related to how well those they supervise do in sales. The advantage, of course, is BDA motivation that their people do well. Solar Sister, however, has decided not to use that approach, as the organization wants the BDAs to focus on generating impact rather than generating revenue. There are strong arguments for each approach. Given the Solar Sister mission of economically empowering women and eradicating energy poverty through entrepreneurship, its focus on impact makes sense.
Conclusions
According to its 2021 Annual Report, Solar Sister corporate is funded through four revenue streams: grants (~47%), donor contributions (~15%), sales (~32%) and other (~4%). Like every social enterprise, Solar Sister must constantly be aware of the tenuousness of each of those streams and look for new ways to support its mission. Other development franchises operating in Africa, such as Living Goods, a health care franchise, and Vision Spring, which provides eyeglasses to artisans, face both similar and unique challenges. All, however, punch above their weight in terms of impact.
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. Just as entrance into urban markets has opened both challenges and opportunities, so too would expansion into other countries. Consideration has also been given to product line expansion, but that would also have to be dependent on geographic regions, country regulations and culture. For example, in areas where grains are a primary agricultural product, milling centers may be long distances away and operate only at specific times, creating long waits. Solar-powered milling machines could be useful for off-grid milling, but not needed everywhere making bulk buying – one of the advantages corporate-wide buying yields to the organization at large. Each of these ideas, however, come with challenges.
Over the course of 15 years, Solar Sister has shown the impact that one idea and person can make with the help of a committed, persistent, and imaginative team. The lessons learned are plentiful. The leadership of each country team is in-country and made up of country nationals. Success requires on-the-ground knowledge. Building the idea among SSEs that they are building their own business, initiated through a personal financial investment, has also been key. Building communities of SSEs who can support and motivate each other is important as well; and letting them know that they are part of something bigger than their group. The role of the BDA cannot be overstated in keeping the communities going and growing. The corporate organization must be a learning organization too, holding true to its values while recognizing opportunities and the need to change when necessary. And finally, again, recognizing that implementation of even the best model is a one-size-fits-one effort is essential.