Mobile power payments and smart meters plug in Tanzanian
homes
DAR ES SALAAM (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Asteria
Lymo saw her prepaid electricity meter was short of units, she grabbed her
smartphone and bought some using Tigo Pesa, a local application that allows
customers to pay their utility bills on their mobile phones.
“I simply transferred the money from my bank account into
my phone to buy electricity,” said the 35-year-old mother of three. “It’s fast,
easy to use, efficient and saves a lot of time and money.”
With 10,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $4.50), Lymo
bought 28 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy - enough to power her home for one
week. Previously, that would have meant standing in a queue for an hour to buy
electricity coupons at a vending kiosk.
Lymo, who lives in the Kimara neighborhood of Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, is among the many customers of state power
supplier TANESCO who now use digital platforms to pay their bills.
A new study suggests that digital payment - whereby users
shift to smart, prepaid metering systems and purchase a set amount of power
electronically - not only helps customers but benefits utility companies and
mini-grid providers too by reducing the costs of metering and credit
operations.
As a result, digital payments are helping make off-grid
power sources like solar and wind more economically viable.
The study, published in July by the Better Than Cash
Alliance, a partnership of governments and international organizations, also
suggests that digital payments can create new business opportunities, increase
transparency, and improve cash flow for utilities and off-grid operators.
While most African countries are embracing modern
technologies like mobile money transfers, utility bill payments across the
continent are still overwhelmingly made in cash, according to the report.
And it points out that traditional electricity meters,
which have to be read manually, can easily be tampered with. Of 76,000
households audited by TANESCO in 2012, 5 percent were found to be stealing
energy.
TANESCO spokesperson Leila Muhaji said most of its
domestic customers now use prepaid plans.
Honest Prosper Ngowi, an economics professor at Mzumbe
University in Dar es Salaam, said the shift from cash to digital payments has
helped utility firms boost revenues significantly and cut transaction costs,
while delivering “social benefits” to their customers, such as eliminating time
spent in queues.
NEW CUSTOMERS
Globally, 1.1 billion people lack access to electricity,
most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Digital payments can help by enabling
mini-grid operators to expand their customer base in areas that are not
connected to the national grid, experts say.
In East Africa alone, pay-as-you-go solar operators have
financed the sale of over 800,000 units of solar home systems, according to a
2016 report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The research organization estimated that digital
payment-enabled solar units will bring renewable electricity to 15 million
households and 75 million people by 2020.
In rural Uganda, customers of Fenix International can
access lighting and phone-charging through a solar system that costs just 380
shillings ($0.11) a day, but only if they can pay digitally, the report says.
In Kenya’s western Kakamega region, Edna Joroge has
recently installed an M-Kopa solar system in her new three-bedroom home.
The farmer had been waiting for a connection to the grid,
but because her house is far from the nearest transformer, she decided to go
solar.
“I paid $217 in one year and got a solar panel, lithium
battery, three lightbulbs, a mobile phone charger, a torch and a radio,” she
told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “This cost is much less than what I had
been incurring buying kerosene.”
With an ambitious target of achieving universal access to
electricity by 2030, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda are now exploring
mini-grids to power rural communities away from the main grid.
In Kenya, U.S.-based technology venture Powerhive
operates a micro-grid network for rural homes and businesses, using smart
meters linked to a cloud-based server.
This integrated system enables customers to pre-pay for
electricity using M-Pesa, a widely used mobile phone-based money transfer
service, while allowing Powerhive to remotely monitor performance, consumption
and cash flows
Source: Reuters
Image: Forbes