In December 2015, the GSMA Mobile for Development Utilities programme awarded an 18-month grant to d.light, in partnership with RE-VOLT and Digicel, to scale up a lease-to-own energy model in Haiti through the distribution of pay-as-you-go (PAYG), M2M-enabled solar home systems (SHS), and to test the impact of PAYG solar on mobile money adoption in areas with low mobile money penetration. According to data collected by Digicel during the course of our grant, 43 per cent of RE-VOLT customers were new mobile money users. Moreover, the introduction of a PAYG SHS increased Digicel’s ARPUs for its RE-VOLT customers by 20 per cent (from HTG 759 ($12) to 913($14)), indicating that these systems can boost mobile revenues. Read more about our learnings from the grant in the case study.
