One billion people live in extreme poverty and off the grid, without basic infrastructure, reliable energy, or efficient consumer products. The past decade has seen the development and distribution of scores of life-changing products designed specifically for those families at the bottom of the pyramid. A solar energy system would easily pay for itself over time, but the poorest of the poor can’t afford the initial investment. Upfront costs stifle adoption rates.
Angaza saw that flaw in the system and created an accessible, affordable, Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) financing mechanism to get solar and clean energy products into households with the greatest need. Angaza’s PAYG platform enables even the smallest, most remote, last-mile distributors to offer affordable financing to their customers on an ever-expanding portfolio of life-changing products in more than 30 countries.
Angaza’s business model is powered by two tools: technology licenses that allow hardware manufacturers to embed remote-activation circuitry into their products, and cloud-based loan activation and enforcement software that help distributors use the PAYG financing approach. Angaza has charted a path for digital finance service providers to fill the market gaps that traditional brick-and-mortar financial institutions leave behind in impoverished urban centers and remote rural communities.
1 Billion people worldwide have no access to electricity, an inequity that reinforces the cycle of poverty.
Angaza enables energy access to base-of-the-pyramid customers with its pay-as-you-go technology.
Lesley launched Angaza in 2012 to address two of the world’s most pressing problems—energy access and financial inclusion.
Distribution partners using Angaza’s platform see a two-to four-fold increase in unit sales and as much as an eight-fold increase in revenue.
All off-grid, low-income households have financial access to life-changing products including solar lighting systems, solar water pumps, and household appliances.
Angaza’s platform enables distributors in emerging markets to extend and manage Pay-As-You-Go product financing to off-grid customers in remote regions. Recognizing that rural distribution is often localized to each particular region, Angaza has developed their software to further increase the competitiveness of local SME distributors. Angaza can also apply the insights it gains through collected aggregated data to help address growth barriers elsewhere in the value chain for life-changing products.
Lesley Marincola the Founder and CEO of Angaza. She developed the idea for Angaza while completing a Master’s of Science degree program in mechanical engineering at Stanford and launched the company in June 2010. Lesley has been recognized with the Santa Clara GSBI scholarship, as the 2012 Tech Awards Laureate, by Businessweek as one of "America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs," as a WEF Young Global Shaper, on Forbes’ "30 Under 30" list, as an Echoing Green Fellow in 2013, and with the 2016 Katherine M. Swanson Young Innovator award.
