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The eternal sunshine of the hopeful mind [Khaleej Times (United Arab Emirates)]
[August 27, 2014]

The eternal sunshine of the hopeful mind [Khaleej Times (United Arab Emirates)]


(Khaleej Times (United Arab Emirates) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) KT talks to Dubai-based firm making available solar-powered products to change lives in Africa.

It rained relentlessly for days after Nelson Mandela died.

The heavy and repeated dousings extinguished the flames of the votive candles being carried by mourners. But the power of the sun would triumph over the clouds.

Marco Signorini is the CEO of Dubai-based international solar products company Solarway. The South African native was in his home country on business at the time of Mandela's death and in the wake, he arranged for the company's solar 'candles' to be distributed amongst several neighbourhoods.



"They had made all these vigils in a lot of places and the candles kept dying ... I was ... going to the airport when they called me to say 'Are you the candle man?'." The Mandelas had got wind of Solarway's inextinguishable candles; and it seems they wanted more.

"When we got to (Mandela's) house ... (through three road blocks) ... cars were being turned away, you can imagine the pandemonium, a guy came to meet us in the driving rain ... he said 'Come, they want you in the house'." Holding a candle to Mandela Amid high tension, Signorini was asked to distribute the 1,000 candles he had packed in his Pajero to the masses gathered outside. When Signorini and a colleague were swarmed, a dozen South African police officers came to help pass the candles out.


"There was this plume of people holding Solarway candles up and Zindzi Mandela said 'Look, you've just got to come back'. Then we went to the street parade, then we went to the physical funeral in his hometown, then we went to the Mandela house in Soweto." That equated to about 3,000 candles in all — and it didn't stop there.

Early days Headquartered in Dubai, Solarway has offices around the world, and has come a long way from inauspicious beginnings in 2010.

The company is a subsidiary of African telecommunications giant Econet Wireless, founded by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, who now lives in South Africa.

While Econet Wireless is doing big business all over the globe, Solarway came about through efforts to improve their not-for-profit, rather than their profit.

"Four years ago ... my chairman's wife came to me and said we have about 60,000 orphans (aligned with the company's corporate social responsibility programme Capernaum Trust). The orphans are getting sick. Number one they can't study because there's no power or lighting, number two they're getting sick from inhaling carbon emissions, candles — with candles come sickness, fire threats, bad eyes, bad lighting — she came to me and said 'You're always in China ... can you please try and source us some solar lighting?'." Signorini says this task opened his eyes to the poor quality of solar products on offer.

After initially setting up a contract with a Chinese manufacturer to produce solar-powered lanterns to disappointing results, the company took on a new direction and Solarway was born.

"Having researched it, we looked at manufacturing all our own products. Every product you see ... we manufacture ourselves apart from ... the physical solar panel and ... the battery.

Quality over cost It is hard to prioritise quality over cost, when funding is sporadic and needs are great.

"A torch costs $1.50. Does it work? It does work. It's got a battery. But if it goes flat you'll throw it away, as it can't be recharged." And this has led to bad Press for solar products, he says, citing his many conversations with African everymen on the technology.

So Solarway has taken on the mission of giving solar products a PR makeover. "We realised it would be about 20 to 25 per cent more expensive than what we found out there (but) we never found any products that we could buy off the shelf that were fit for purpose." Solarway leveraged its Econet connection and used the industry knowledge, pre-existing buying power and manufacturing plants to produce what Signorini calls the best quality products in the market.

Innovative products Solarway also has a vast array of products, with innovative additions. They are not just lights, but lights with built-in radios and mobile phone chargers.

"We're the first people to genuinely get in at this level, we've got 16 products; our competitors have three or four at best. We're bringing in another five products ... we're meeting every part of the market." Signorini says the company is making products of a first-world standard, and have customers all over the globe — a particular hit on the outdoorsy scene. But they're making very little to no profit margins "for now"; a deliberate decision to build the up brand first. It seems to be working.

Other Solarway products include solar-powered generators that can power small hairdressers, bicycle lights, and utility boxes developed for an unnamed African military. They also have distributed 1,300 solar power 'kiosks' in Zimbabwe to the jobless, from which customers can buy Solarway products, Econet Wireless mobile phone credit and charge mobile phones.

The highest kiosk earner in one given week was $35,000 — a tidy little earner, considering the seller can earn up to 15 per cent of the kiosk revenue.

But if you suspect more than marginal self-interest is at play amongst all this altruism, you'd be right. While right now profit margins are low, this savvy stroke of diversification is feeding directly back into the mobile arm of Econet Wireless with immediate results.

Mobile phone charger Ninety per cent of Solarway products come equipped with a mobile phone charger. The importance of this cannot be underplayed in a market like Zimbabwe where people often walk for miles and pay 50 cents to charge their phone, when the World Bank shows the average income in 2013 was only about $4.30 a day.

"We gave away 130,000 solar mobile chargers ... to our own subscribers in Zimbabwe and wherever we have our networks. The first thing we noticed was the mobile phone usage per month ... went up 80 to 90 cents per subscriber." Instead of conserving charge on their phones by switching them off frequently, users began leaving phones on.

"This thing costs me about $10. I give it to a customer for free. He's giving me through airtime almost a dollar a month back. I've made that money back in less than a year. Now for every other time he uses that, it's profit." But self-interest or not, in a world with dwindling resources in a race against time to limit the damage done by carbon emissions, this has to be a step in the right direction.

The history of literature and poetry tells us there are plenty of reasons to equate hope with the sun. ? [email protected] (c) 2014 Khaleej Times. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).

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