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The company’s founder, a young engineer Thomas Samuel, has another goal: to expand this “social business”, to address directly consumers in developing countries, to give them – through solar energy – access to the world.
Samuel knows Africa well. In this vast continent, 600 million people do not yet have access to electricity. Yet 80% of the population has a mobile phone. Here is the challenge.
With a small solar panel, as big as an iPad, people can run three light bulbs and, most importantly, charge a cell phone that is sold with the rest of the kit. The project is called Moon, like the light of the moon. People pay a very small sum per month and after six months or one year, they become owners of their kit. Access to a smartphone changes their lives: communication with distant relatives, various applications to help them manage family accounts, malaria prevention, or learn a foreign language.
EURACTIV went to visit Moon’s facilities in the Ziguinchor countryside in Senegal, with the founder of Sunna Design.