Portable offgrid power.
Mobile phone use in rural Africa is growing exponentially, but most of these phones do not have access to power: 90 per cent of Ugandans have mobile coverage, but only 4 per cent have power, and with sights on economic growth and stabilised connection with the outside world, mobile phones are proving revolutionary in remote villages.
But you can't run a phone without power. BuffaloGrid is a solar powered hub for rural African towns that would otherwise be without power for another decade.
Costing a quarter of the average daily wage in Uganda, most people will turn off their phones and search for free charge facilities, making it uneconomic to sell charge. Many other initiatives have tried and failed to find a sustainable and economic way to charge rural phones.
BuffaloGridTM has found a viable and sustainable solution to this problem. By using the latest technology and engineering combined with a new economic and distribution model, we will materially reduce the cost of mobile phone charging and the cost of provision of off-grid electricity to remote areas.
BuffaloGrid's vision is to scale up its revolutionary product and business model to transform the lives of an unprecedented population of people across Africa, bring power to some of the poorest local economies in the world, create tens of thousands of new entrepreneurs and establish an unrivalled distribution network across Africa and then the developing world.
