Pay As You Cook (making electronic cooking assets affordable) in Kenya & Uganda.
The provision of a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) cooking system, powered by M-KOPA’s Solar Home Systems (SHS), could enable rural, off-grid customers the option to utilise clean cooking. This project sought to find a solution that suits current biomass cooks who currently dominate M-KOPA’s customer base. By undertaking a range of studies and reviews to understand product availability, cooking practices and preferences, along with power requirements of suitable devices, M-KOPA wanted to understand the potential for uptake in this emerging market. Whilst they found that a realisation in innovation needs to occur before their customer base can benefit in the clean cooking revolution, they did come to a number of conclusions that can provide accessible clean cooking to those who currently do not have it.
M-KOPA identified a number of opportunities that could enable the greater uptake of clean cooking. These include a growing interest from customers in innovative clean cooking devices as new, efficient technologies are brought to market; they identified a new target market within urban areas where biomass cooking has been found to be prevalent; and they highlighted the potential for cooking devices that could be powered by M-KOPA’s emerging hybrid (grid+solar+battery) power system. This system is focussed on providing affordable energy to enable the use of energy-intensive devices.
These developments offer an opportunity for M-KOPA to continue to explore the growing options available to realise PAYG clean cooking for its customers.