PEG Africa, a leading distributed energy company, passed US$1 million of sales from hundreds of pump installations in 2020.
PEG Africa is a leader in deploying and financing solar products to rural and peri-urban households and SMEs in West Africa. It focuses on providing embedded finance for useful and productive assets, such as solar home systems via its PAYG financing model. This enables its customers to replace their perpetual spending on poor-quality polluting fuels with solar energy.
The company, which has over 700,000 daily users in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Mali, has raised more than US$50 million in funding over the last four years, and has been actively diversifying its product offering to meet customer needs.
PEG Africa started piloting solar pumps in 2019, and now makes them available in three of its markets. Using the same approach as with its solar home systems, PEG Africa finances solar water pumps for smallholder farmers, livestock and poultry owners, and community drinking water over a period of up to 18 months. The company has deployed 0.5MW of solar water pumps, and expects to triple that in 2021.
“In Africa, 80 percent of families depend on agriculture for their livelihood, but only four percent use irrigation due to the instability or absence of the electricity grid. Using our innovative financing model, people in these communities can now access clean and effective technology in an affordable manner,” said Hugh Whalan, CEO of PEG Africa.
In successfully hitting this solar pump sales milestone, PEG is showing it can leverage its distribution and credit capabilities to provide additional products and services. The company is building on this momentum by piloting solar refrigerators in three of its markets which will mostly target customers who are able to use the product for productive use and therefore derive higher incomes.
“We are showing that we can bring additional productivity, jobs and income to the consumers we serve, helping people who once relied on polluting and expensive fuels like kerosene, candles, batteries and diesel to leapfrog into a clean energy future,” Whalan said.
