Assessing Enterprise-Level Benefits of Direct Monitoring of Solar PV Products in East Africa

Businesses serving the poor in developing economies often struggle to understand local consumer behavior and preferences. They also face considerable difficulties with product support and quality control, in large part because of a lack of post-sale data about their products’ performance. Meanwhile, many of these businesses are styled as social enterprises because the products they sell promote development. However, there is often insufficient accountability in the social enterprise space around whether products actually deliver their intended development benefits. New data logging technology and data analysis tools have the potential to address the challenges set out above through the direct monitoring of customers’ usage of these products. This exploratory grant would fund a one-year study to demonstrate the utility of directly monitoring product use in developing economies. In particular, we will use direct monitoring as a tool to gain previously-unavailable insights into consumer behavior, product performance and quality, and development impacts in the particular context of the east African solar PV industry.