Nearly 70 percent of Rwandans have cell phones, but only a small fraction have reliable electricity. How one entrepreneur is using solar energy to solve infrastructure problems that have plagued the country for decades.
By Jeremy Craig
few years ago, while visiting his mother in Burundi, Henri Nyakarundi found himself unable to manage a simple task he took for granted in Atlanta: charging his cell phone.
Like other East African countries, Burundi’s electrical grid struggles to keep up with demand, and Nyakarundi couldn’t find dependable electricity access. It’s a problem that’s only getting worse as more and more people buy cell phones.
“With the mobile [phone] revolution, everybody in the city had a mobile phone, and unfortunately there were huge problems with electricity,” said Nyakarundi, who’s originally from neighboring Rwanda. “It’s even worse now because of the growth.”
As in much of the developing world, because landline phone infrastructure is lacking, comparatively inexpensive cell phones have proliferated in Burundi and Rwanda.
Nearly 70 percent of Rwandans own cell phones, and only 22 percent of the population has access to electrical service, according to the World Bank.
Nyakarundi’s solution? Solar-powered mobile kiosks where people can pay a small fee to charge their phones.
“I looked for an existing technology to fit what I was looking for, but I couldn’t find anything,” said Nyakarundi, who graduated from Georgia State University with a computer science degree in 2003.
After outsourcing the design and production of the prototype to an engineer in Poland, he grew the venture from a single kiosk in the Rwandan capital of Kigali to 25 franchisees operating across the country. Founded in 2012, the African Renewable Energy Distributor (ARED) runs 11 kiosks in Kigali and has 14 operators in rural areas.
With a population that has either spotty service or no electricity at all, Nyakarundi’s kiosks have found their niche. And they’ve become more than just places to charge phones.
More than phone charging
ARED kiosks recently added money transfer services, airtime reloading—nearly all phones in Africa are prepaid—as well as wi-fi access.
“It’s impossible to build a business just on charging,” Nykarundi said. “The charging is a point of entry.”
Each kiosk serves 30 to 40 people, with some walking miles to get there. Most of those customers need additional services, he said.
“Instead of them going to different areas,” he said, “why not build a service where somebody can get all of those services under one umbrella?”
His stations have brought wifi access to refugee camps in parts of East Africa.
“The International Committee of the Red Cross is helping to bring educational content with the kiosks to the kids who live in the camps,” he said.
An environment ripe for innovation
Nyakarundi knows firsthand what it’s like to be displaced from his homeland.
He came to the United States as a teenager in the 1990s after civil war ravaged Rwanda. In metro Atlanta, he gained an education, worked multiple jobs and eventually started his own business, a trucking company.
By the late 2000s, seeing Rwanda’s recovery from the war and its growing economy, he was ready to go home.
“I used to come home during the summertime, and I started seeing a lot of changes in Rwanda,” he said. “I talked to a few people there, and they told me there were a lot of opportunities, and I was missing my family.”
But he knew he had to learn to adapt to doing business back home, and about the specific needs of each market.
“Doing business in different countries requires you to learn about new laws,” he said. “But you can be very innovative here with less money than you can in the United States.”
Nyakarundi didn’t need millions in venture capital to get his kiosk business off the ground. He spent a little more than $100,000 of his own savings from his old trucking company. He’s seeking to expand ARED into other countries in the next few years, with sights on having hundreds of franchisees.
The need to innovate on a shoestring budget is born out of necessity, he said.
“We’re talking about a population that’s going to double in the next 25 to 30 years,” and there’s massive need for agricultural and energy improvements,” Nyakarundi said. “It’s one of the biggest differences between here and the United States. You don’t need a lot of money to make a difference.”
PHOTOS COURTESY OF HENRI NYAKARUNDI