Though most Americans take electricity in their home for granted, more than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to it.
To light their homes, they instead use flashlights, candles or kerosene lamps, which produce fumes that are hazardous to their health. People in the region need better lighting methods, but insufficient capacity and high costs are major reasons why they don’t.
But that’s where NovoMoto comes in. The Madison startup, launched in 2015 by Aaron Olson and Mehrdad Arjmand, distributes solar-panel-based electricity kits on a rent-to-own basis to communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 91 percent of people don’t have access to electricity. The kits come with a solar panel and a small battery pack that’s used for lighting and charging phones.
After a $10 down payment and three years of paying $2.15 a week, customers own the systems, which are designed to last about 20 years. They can pay the fee through their cellphone and pay for multiple weeks at a time if they choose. For an extra fee, customers can get access to radios, TVs and fans.
NovoMoto has sent 100 kits to Congo and have another shipment of 100 arriving in a couple of weeks. They currently have 74 paying customers and 20 more are being installed by the end of June, which should produce more paying customers, Olson said.
And the startup has ambitious goals. By the end of this year, they hope to serve more than 2,000 households in the Congo, and 20,000 by the end of 2019.
So far, NovoMoto has raised $200,000 from two U.S. Department of Energy grants, UW-Madison competitions and the Clean Energy Trust in Chicago, among other methods.
NovoMoto is able to make the kits so affordable because solar, LED and DC appliance technology has become cheaper over the last 5-10 years. The founders say that their product is 58 percent cheaper than paying for kerosene regularly.
“Right now, these communities are spending about 30 percent of their income to provide lighting inside their homes, whether it be kerosene, candles or disposable flashlights,” Olson said. “What we do is offer them a solution that is better and saves them money.”
Olson, who was born in the Congo, said he’s been back to visit and seen first-hand the difficulties communities there face with no electricity.
“I got a chance to see communities that were actually in need for a better option for lighting and electricity,” Olson said. “After coming home from that trip, we had a chance to really evaluate different options for how others had been doing off-grid electricity.”
NovoMoto currently only serves people in the Congo, but has plans to expand to more countries in the region, including Tanzania and Liberia. They could enter new markets as soon as 2019, and eventually offer tablets and computers, said the founders, both of which have strong ties to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Arjmand received his Ph.D. from the college's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center last year and Olson is finishing up one this summer from UW-Madison's Fusion Technology Institute.
"UW-Madison has played a big role for myself and NovoMoto," Arjmand said.
The founders decided to name the startup NovoMoto because "novo" translates to "new" in Portuguese and "moto" translates to "energy" or "fire" in Lingala, a language spoken in the western part of the Congo. The startup's team is comprised of nine people, some of which work in Madison and others who are based in the Congo. In Madison, the founders work at Madworks Accelerator, a co-working office space affiliated with UW-Madison.
