Building on our report “Sizing the Opportunity of Mobile to Support Energy and Water Access”, the GSMA Mobile Enabled Community Service Programme has released two new reports, presenting in more detail the current initiatives, business models and opportunities the mobile sector can play in Africa and in Asia to better address development challenges around energy and water access.
The five mobile channels, outlined previously, are reaching different levels of dynamics in these two regions at a country level, and within the energy and water sectors:
- While the mobile-enabled Pay-As-You-Go model for solar has already gained traction in Africa, with more than 60,000 units sold in 2013 mainly in East Africa under a financed purchase or ‘energy as a service’ scheme, this model is still nascent in Asia; the deeper level of partnership between mobile operators and Energy Service Companies and the greater maturity of mobile money services have been drivers of the adoption of innovative solar solutions.
- However, the Community Power from Mobile model, where mobile towers act as an anchor tenant in mini-grids or energy hubs, is more advanced in parts in Asia, especially South Asia, where rural population density is high and the maturity level of Energy Service Companies implementing and operating such decentralised energy services is improving.
- Even though more companies and institutions are leveraging mobile solutions as part of their water service delivery, mobile is still at an early stage of integration in the water sector on both continents. Mobile impact could however be important on a short term and the scale of mobile-enabled water services and solutions could reach millions of people currently relying on ageing and/or unreliable water infrastructure.
- Trials of mobile monitoring tools to improve the collection of data at the end-user level, either through smart meters or mobile phone-based solutions, are showing promising results and, in the near future, it will be critical to implement open data platforms in order to optimize access and usage of such data at the institutional level; the development of innovative mobile financial services targeting improved payment collection and new financing options for water or energy customers also have the potential to disrupt these sectors.
Download the reports
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Overall, these reports present an overview of the growing integration between mobile, energy and water, providing cross learning opportunities between the African and Asian-based initiatives.
With our ongoing Innovation Funding and knowledge sharing activities, we hope to further support entrepreneur initiatives in this space and encourage the creation of partnerships between mobile and energy/water players. In the coming months, the team will continue its research activities, with a special focus on the Pay-As-You-Go for Energy and the Mobile for Water Access topics.
Top photo: A cloudy day in a village in Uganda, where Pamoja Cleantech provides electricity to the local population using Husk Power biomass technology.