Jun 02

Partnership with HSBC in India

MicroEnergy Credits, HSBC in India form partnership to expand clean energy market

MicroEnergy Credits (MEC) and HSBC in India have formed a partnership to provide solutions to Microfinance Institutions and communities to tap into emerging opportunities in global carbon credit markets, through adapting to renewable energy.

Household access to electricity for productive purposes (industry, irrigation and commercial activities), and for human development purposes (education and health facilities) all contribute to economic development and poverty reduction. Lack of access to or interruptions to electric grid service in developing countries are constantly affecting businesses, education, agriculture and other activities which cannot function without power.

In addition, recurring illnesses such as chest and upper respiratory illnesses have been attributed to smoke caused by current cooking technologies and fuels. Studies have shown that substituting cleaner cooking fuels such as LPG or biogas digesters can halve infant mortality rate and greatly reduce chronic lung disease and cancer in women and children.

MEC and HSBC in India will work together to identify obstacles faced by Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) to initiate clean energy programs, develop and implement solutions. This partnership will expand the scope of MFIs to access carbon credit markets, by launching their energy programs expeditiously and efficiently, which will result in improved environmental and economic conditions for rural poor communities in India.

“I’m proud to partner with HSBC and support the microenterprise sector to join the global effort to stop climate change and benefit from the carbon markets” said April Allderdice, CEO of MicroEnergy Credits Corp.

Added Puneet Chaddha, Managing Director and Head, Commercial Banking, HSBC India, “This partnership embodies HSBC’s commitment to assist in improving the living conditions of the financially excluded population in a sustainable manner. This effort will also have a positive impact on climate change. ”

Both MEC and HSBC have been spearheading global clean energy initiatives. MEC is the recognized leader in solutions-based carbon trading market. Using internet and mobile phone technology MEC aggregates carbon offsets from the clients of Microfinance Institutions and sells them to the carbon markets, enabling better and cleaner energy choices for the market at the bottom of the pyramid. HSBC was the first bank to demonstrate global carbon neutrality in 2005. HSBC too is a signatory to the Equator Principles and ensures that all its lending activities do not lead to projects that harm the environment, and actively promotes activities which help the environment

Posted by April on June 2, 2009 at 7:49 pm Comments Off
Apr 12

Clean Development Mechanism for Bottom of the Pyramid

Co-founder April Allderdice is interviewed March 4, 2009 by Aileen Nowlan for Next Billion, in an article about Clean Development Mechanism for Bottom of the Pyramid.

More posts moving over from http://microenergycredits.blogspot.com/

Contact MicroEnergy Credits at info @ microenergycredit DOT com.

Posted by James Dailey on April 12, 2009 at 3:23 pm Comments Off
Feb 23

Schools in Uganda are Solar Enterprises

While working in Uganda for the past two weeks, I visited the Aunt Agnes Infant School which recently purchased a solar photovoltaic system and is part of FINCA Uganda’s Microfinance Carbon Portfolio.

In Uganda where many schools are private, a school owner is a microenterprise, and a microfinance loan can help them make investments in infrastructure which increase their profitability while improving the quality of education for local children

In this video, a teacher describes how the system enabled the students, or “learners,” to improve their performance, increase their motivation, and how word of mouth about the system led to increased enrollments.
video

Posted by James Dailey on February 23, 2009 at 10:16 pm Comments Off
Dec 16

More MFIs enlist in Microfinance-Carbon Program

MEC’s pipeline is growing. Our most recent partner is XacBank in Mongolia, who found us through the Energy Links Podcast, an initiative of ACCION’s Center For Financial Inclusion, and USAID’s FIELD program. You can listen to our podcast here.

XacBank is a well established microfinance institution with over 100,000 clients. The temperature now in Ulan Bator is -44° F. XacBank’s clean energy project manager shared with me stories of clients that are burning plastic audio cassette cases for heat. Simple clean technologies such as efficient cookstoves and insulating blankets for yurts can significantly reduce the consumption of heating fuels, saving the clients money and improving the environment. MEC is looking forward to our partnership with XacBank, where the carbon revenues we provide will help XacBank link their clients to these clean tech products.

Posted by James Dailey on December 16, 2008 at 9:39 pm Comments Off
Nov 08

MEC presents at Web 2.0 Summit

MEC presented at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The theme of the panel was location aware applications for mobile devices. This was a great chance to think big thoughts about how trends in technology adoption have enabled our social enterprise, and in turn how applications like ours may impact markets in the future.

Although telecom economics make it unlikely that there will be mass-adoption of location based services like Miloki or Citysense in the markets that MEC serves, the fact remains that GPS enabled cellphones have now been commercialized and are available in most countries. Some enterprises (like ours) will leverage them, creating a potential for broad ripple effects throughout BOP populations. For example, with our system, one loan officer may use a GPS device to provide location data for a thousand small clean energy investments.

In addition to our application, newly available cell phone technologies are creating surprising social and economic opportunities for the BOP. A good example is MPESA in Kenya which now has 4 million account holders compared to a total of 5 million deposit accounts in the whole banking sector of the country. Other applications are helping people earn income with their cellphone, like CellBazaar, which is “Craig’s list” on your cell phone in Bangladesh, and Txt Eagle, which lets individuals do jobs such as translation over their cell phone.

The cell phone age (there are now over 3.2 billion cell phone subscriptions—nearly half the population of the planet) creates an opportunity to intelligently harvest the data that can make the BOP investment grade.

My interview from Web 2.0 is posted here.

Posted by James Dailey on November 8, 2008 at 10:45 pm Comments Off
Oct 20

SoCap 2008 Creating Value

The Social Capital Markets Conference in San Francisco September 2008 was an opportunity for MEC to meet up with other entrepreneurs working at the intersection of business and human progress. Coming in the midst of a growing financial crisis, many commented that the strong attendance was an indication that from the crisis could come a new way of organizing our financial markets. By measuring social and environmental impact, we would improve capitalism. My personal take on the Social Capital movement is that by attempting to bring the rigors of measurement to the benefits that accrue to people and society, the movement is fundamentally about bringing balance back to markets and capitalisms.

My ethics professor at Notre Dame business undergraduate studies (Hock) in the 1980s often commented that “creating the customer for the longterm” was an eroding value in modern American business, with long term catastrophic tendencies for capitalism. Thus, stable earnings occur when business leaders take the long view. Creating the customer means to me seeing the potential of each individual regardless of the accident of where they were born and finding ways to make them part of your financial future.

MEC recognizes that measuring the benefits of clean energy for people, planet, and society is vital for ensuring that mission remains linked to that long term “create the customer” ethic.

I got a lot out of the SoCap conference, and look forward to keeping in touch with this hopeful group of people.

Posted by James Dailey on October 20, 2008 at 10:48 pm Comments Off
Sep 02

The Challenge of Low Carbon Investing in Developing Countries

MicroEnergy Credits was mentioned in Climate Wire today in a fascinating article by Lisa Friedman about the challenges of low-carbon investment in developing countries:

“April Allderdice, an adviser to Grameen Shakti and president of MicroEnergy Credits in Seattle, said the influx of renewable energy in a country where 70 percent of the population has no access to grid electricity has been stunning. For the first time in some people’s lives, she said, they are able to work in the evening by decent light and children can continue to study once the sun goes down.

“It’s completely transformative,” Allderdice said. She argued that CDM projects, because they are market-driven, create more lasting changes to energy consumption in poor countries than simple grants or charity work. CDMs, she said, “enable a sustainable market-based approach to rolling out clean energy as opposed to dirty.”

See the full article here

Posted by James Dailey on September 2, 2008 at 10:52 pm Comments Off
Jun 05

Incremental Software Development Key To Success

One of the challenges as the CTO of Micro Energy Credits is building from the ground up with minimal resources. This is a challenge nearly all start ups face, but is perhaps even more pronounced in this phase of development.

Each decision to invest in a software development effort starts with the question, can we find something off the shelf? and what is the level of effort that makes sense given the expected benefit within the next 9-12 months? By bounding the effort in terms of effort and cost, we ensure that requirements for that particular technology system stays within reason. This inevitably creates a conversation with the rest of the management about the trade-offs and thus leads to a process for setting priorities. This is not unique, really, I credit the folks of 37signals in their publication “Getting Real” with a good articulation of how to ensure strong alignment of information technology systems with the current phase of development. Its really a variation of “doing what matters”.

And, we try to learn by our mistakes. In the early stages of the project we went a little “over the top” with the requirement for scalability. We decided to engineer our solution to be highly scalable by using the emerging technology of cloud computing (Amazon’s EC2), which also allowed us to be charged on a “pay as you go” model. This made a lot of sense at the time, but we failed to realize the complexity involved in doing this, which led to some unanticipated costs. So, after paying for this for several months, we realized this was overkill for our current level of development and while keeping the configuration on ice, we effectively killed that account. I’m confident this wasn’t wasted effort, as it illustrated how to make better near term decisions, and gives us a foot in the cloud computing door, should we need that.

Doing more with less is actually a terrific discipline, at least in retrospect. ;)

Posted by James Dailey on June 5, 2008 at 10:54 pm Comments Off
May 17

Finca Uganda becomes first MFI in Uganda to receive carbon revenues

Finca Uganda, a microfinance institution with over 40,000 clients, and part of the global FINCA Network became MEC’s first MFI partner in May. FINCA has been an amazing partner for us combining an incredibly innovative and forward looking team at the headquarters level and impressively capable and committed leadership and project management at the MFI level.

One moment stood out for me as emblematic of the role of carbon in microfinance. Finca had already started marketing solar home systems to its clients. To receive credit for the carbon offset for these systems, we needed to collect the gps location and have the client sign the title to the carbon offset to Finca. I asked the project manager, whether the client would be willing to sign the title paperwork, given the system was already in place. She went in the house with the client, the owner of a privately-owned boarding school, and when they came out she had the signature. She said that he was so happy that someone had come to check on the system, that he was more than happy to sign the paperwork. Although the system was functioning properly, he needed assistance with the connection to the computer he was using and eventually decided to put the lights in the children’s dormitories.

By linking the carbon revenues to an ongoing monitoring process, the MEC process creates an incentive for ongoing customer service and relationship building. This has the potential to provide great value to the microenterpreneurs, that will ultimately pay off in improved client acquisition and profitability for the MFI as well.

Posted by James Dailey on May 17, 2008 at 10:55 pm Comments Off
May 04

MicroEnergy Credits launches at the Lighting Africa Conference

lighting-africaMicroEnergy Credits launched in May at two conferences in Africa. The first was the Lighting Africa Conference in Accra, Ghana. MEC and EcoSecurities presented jointly in the vendor’s hall. In the picture I am standing next to Aaron Senanu, the charismatic and dynamic project manager for Africa at EcoSecurities. Since the beginning the whole team at EcoSecurities have been incredible partners, grasping the vision, providing needed marketing support and technical support in valuation of the offsets. We’ve met dozens of manufacturers and distributors of innovative clean-tech technologies for the bottom of the pyramid. Many of these manufacturers are quite amenable to working with Microfinance Institutions to bring their products to microenterprise clients. As we build up our network of MFIs, we will increasingly link them to these vendors of innovative clean technology products.

Posted by James Dailey on May 4, 2008 at 10:56 pm Comments Off
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