African Clean Energy – Europe’s highest scoring B-Corp, are on a mission to provide clean energy for rural households in the developing world.
African Clean Energy (ACE) is a social enterprise dedicated to providing electrical and thermal energy to Sub-Saharan countries.
Their hybrid energy solution, the ACE One, provides a smokeless cooking experience and generates solar electricity for its users, helping communities to transition to cleaner fuel alternatives.
For more than a decade, ACE has served as a leader in providing cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient energy for residents of developing countries.
"This is new and innovative - using digital technologies that we generally use for hailing rides and getting food delivered to our door, to pull people out of poverty, reduce deforestation, and improve energy access." - Judith Walker, ACE COO
We spoke with Judith Walker, ACE's COO, about the company's beginnings, the impact ACE is making in the developing world, the importance of their B-Corp status, and winning the 2021 EY Social Impact award.
1. Can you tell us how ACE came to be? What inspired the idea behind the enterprise?
My parents were living in Lesotho, Southern Africa, when we started the company, and we saw the energy crisis first-hand along with the issues that came with it. Lesotho is a very small, mountainous, country in southern Africa, which is very cold in winter, so people rely primarily on biomass as a source of energy. Most of the time that means burning open fires inside their homes.
Looking into this sector a little bit closer, we realised there were very few companies that were addressing the issue. It is often resigned to development agencies to solve, and if it's not the hot topic of the year, then it's often not addressed sufficiently. That's why, for 50 odd years, we've not made a dent in this problem. Historically, there's been a big focus on electricity access, largely because lighting was so important and required a lot of electricity. But now, with the invention of LED lighting, the amount of electricity you need is almost none to meet that basic need. However, thermal energy for cooking, heat and for boiling water still requires a huge amount of energy, and it's been largely ignored.
We started out making cooking stoves, and the idea was to make sure that they were more efficient, used less fuel, and that they produced absolutely no smoke. The ACE One is a hybrid energy system that burns any kind of biomass without smoke very cleanly, efficiently, and uses solar energy for electricity so that you have your core basic needs covered in one system. Not only can users heat/cook using the ACE One, but the solar panel allows them to charge electrical devices such as a mobile phone or power an LED light.
“The ACE One is a hybrid energy system that burns any kind of biomass without smoke very cleanly, efficiently, and uses solar energy for electricity so that you have your core basic needs covered in one system.”
Photo Credit: African Clean Energy
2. How easy is it for customers to purchase the ACE One?
We sell the ACE One directly to customers and see that as quite important. We sell the system on credit contracts: customers can sign a contract, make a down payment, and then pay that off over 9 to 15 months. We keep these increments within the scope of affordability because the idea of allowing the ACE One to be purchased over time is that it would pay for itself. We want to make sure that those repayments are small enough that it doesn't hugely impact monthly expenses, that it's a similar cost to what they would have been spending, or in fact less than they would have been spending on candles, kerosene and charcoal.
The idea is to transition people from an inefficient way of cooking to a very efficient way, where you’re able to start saving money straight away because the repayments don’t feel like a burden.
3. Are you measuring the well-being and health benefits of having a product that is not burning fossil fuels within the home environment?
It's important for us to understand the impact we are having on health & well-being. Something that we have designed and hope to implement in the next couple of years is how we can show the correlation between using our product, and a reduction in household air pollution and lung health improvement.
Household air pollution is proven to be the cause of 4,000,000 deaths a year according to the WHO and the cause of severe health impacts including a huge impact on disability affected life years. Currently, there is only very little data that replacing an open fire with our product is guaranteed to have a health impact, although, it's proven to reduce household air pollution – it's an incredibly difficult thing to measure over time but something that we absolutely want to be able to do.
Photo Credit: African Clean Energy
4. Where is the ACE One currently being sold?
We currently sell directly to customers in Lesotho, Cambodia, Uganda and Kenya, and we do have a partner that is working on another model in Mozambique.
5. Could you tell us a bit about your role as ACE's COO?
I often describe it as Ruben - who's the CEO, sketches out the vision, the concepts, the innovation and what we're working towards, and as Chief Operating Officer I'm focused on the details, how we make Ruben’s vision happen.
Most of my work involves making sure we understand what we’re doing and being agile enough to pivot when necessary to meet the needs of our customers, employees, and stakeholders in an efficient and scalable manner.
We’ve been thinking about how we implement tools that we know work – think about Uber and Gorilla’s technologies, where you can have almost anything at your door within 30 minutes - how do we implement that to household energy in countries where energy access isn't even available yet? We want to bring that level of innovation and efficiency so it becomes an obvious choice, not just for the end-user who gets the benefits of affordable energy access, but also to governments and people who have the money to execute things at scale in a way that makes sense for everybody involved.
Photo Credit: African Clean Energy
“Think about Uber and Gorilla’s technologies, where you can have almost anything at your door within 30 minutes - how do we implement that to household energy in countries where energy access isn’t even available yet?”
6. ACE has the highest B-Corp score in Europe (179.8). Tell us what the B-Corp process has been like for you, and why this has been so important?
Being B-Corp certified was, and still is, so aligned with what we believe business should be for; it’s a movement for companies that think business can be done better. You make business decisions not just based on money, but by looking at the effect and impact that it has on every stakeholder.
As a young entrepreneur, it's incredibly difficult to figure out what the best standards and practices are, what other people are doing, and what you should be striving for when it comes to ethical and policy factors in your business.
What the B-Corp and the B impact assessment did that was good not only for me but for the whole company, was to give us a measure of success across every aspect of our business. It meant being able to have it laid out in front of me in terms of categories that I should prioritise and make sure that I look at, e.g.: are we taking gender or disabilities into account? Are we taking age into account? Are we taking affordability into account? For us, it was an exercise in understanding how we could structure the way we monitor the impact that we have at every level, and to set the bar higher for ourselves. It made us make commitments that we had to stick to, and it has given us a lot of ideas for how to build the kind of business that we think we should be.
7. If other businesses were looking to improve their B-Corp score, what advice would you give them?
My advice is that the highest decision-makers need to be involved in the process and they have to care about the results. One of the reasons that we were able to do so well is because I’m across every level of our business. I was able to implement things because I know how they function: I knew where to adjust the processes and I had the authority to do that.
The B-Corp application needs to be seen as a priority internally. What happens all too often is that the goal is to become a B-Corp, as opposed to using it as a tool to assess whether you're running your business in a way that you believe it should be done. At ACE, I wanted this to be the guiding star of how we build our business, as opposed to an exercise in filling in a form.
Don't give up. Keep looking at your processes to try and see where you can improve to make sure that you are a company for the future, and not just for the now.
8. You have clearly touched and changed the lives of so many through ACE. Is there anything you are particularly proud of?
Photo Credit: African Clean Energy
Historically, this sector has been drastically underfunded even though a third of the world cooks on an open fire and needs this kind of a solution. Although organisations and NGO’s work across energy access and cooking solutions, it’s still not the core focus. Many of these organisations might not even have an energy department, and if they do, it often encompasses such a broad scope of access to energy that it is not a priority. I'm proud that it is our core focus. It means that we're experts on this in a way that very few organisations are.
I'm particularly proud of a new revolutionary element that we’re working on. It's a model where we use digital technologies, not only to have better communication with the customers so that they can see their own data but also so we can gather some data about their usage as we're looking at the rising trend of carbon finance, the people purchasing carbon offsets.
We have one of the most exciting carbon offsets because not only does it reduce carbon, but it also improves health, fosters gender equality, is safer, less hazardous, does not pollute the environment, and reduces deforestation. It is a combination of various impacts in one, as opposed to just less carbon.
The way we implement our digital technologies means we can measure exactly what we've already offset (not a projection, and not an estimate – but how much an individual has actually used) and sell that carbon. It's so interesting because if our customer then doesn't buy it, doesn’t use it, doesn’t like it or doesn't want to transition, not only are they not a revenue stream, but the other revenue stream is no longer available (selling carbon offsets) as we are selling something created by the end-user. The end-user becomes our supplier. That keeps them central in our model in a way that, historically, no one has managed to do. No one has managed to keep the poorest people in the world completely aligned with their commercial model because they’re always relying on money from other sources.
This is new and innovative - using digital technologies that we generally use for hailing rides and getting food delivered to our door, to pull people out of poverty, reduce deforestation, and improve energy access.
9. What has been the impact within the communities in which you operate?
Poverty alleviation is a really important part of energy access and the work that we do. Part of it is creating good employment and creating a lot of jobs: sales agents, maintenance agents, people reselling fuels, people bringing fuels and products to various places. We want to do all of that locally so that we are pumping money into local economies, rather than seeing countries exporting the majority of their wealth for fossil fuels.
All the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) are affected by energy access. Gender, for example: the burden of gathering fuel and cooking falls to women and girls in many communities, and there’s a huge risk for gender-based violence, especially as they have to travel further and further out of their settlements and villages to gather fuel. The ACE One is able to burn any type of biomass fuel which alleviates the need for women to travel so far to collect wood or charcoal.
Photo Credit: African Clean Energy
10. ACE won EY's Social Impact Award for 2021 last year. How does it feel to be recognised by such a large organisation?
It felt great. It allows us to put this sector and this issue that doesn’t often get any attention, on a platform. Access to energy is so wildly misunderstood, even by people who are experts in the energy sector, and it means that thermal energy and cooking solutions are largely ignored even at a policy level. Having this recognised as being worthy of notice from a different perspective - the private sector, a commercial space - it gives us opportunities and opens doors to speak to more investors, more donors, and more organisations that might be seeing this issue in a different light.
It's important for us that we have this platform, not just to represent the company, but to represent the industry and the issues.
11. What are your goals for 2022 and beyond?
2022 is the year of connecting all the dots, making sure that everything is flawless and ready for scale. We also want to align everyone to the ACE mission and our key performance indicator, which is: how much carbon have we offset? It means that everyone in the organisation has a laser focus on making sure that our customer is happy and keep using the product. Someone can own the product, but it only generates impact for them if they’re using it and not using charcoal, not spending more money on charging their phone or lighting their house. Everyone, no matter what role they have in the team, has an impact on that.
Our key goal over the next couple of years is to transition to that KPI being our most important metric, including in our financial reporting on an annual basis. We think it aligns everybody with the mission, which is to make sure that our end-user is happy in using their product because that's when you're generating impact.
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