By Solar Sister
Solar Sister and ENERGIA have been longstanding partners. With funding from Sida, ENERGIA supports Solar Sister in creating and growing Sisterhoods in Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya. The Sisterhood entrepreneurs deliver clean energy directly to homes in rural African communities. Our current project runs from October 2022 till September 2026. Two years into the project we are excited to share some of the highlights.
Empowering Through Apprenticeships
In 2023, we launched the Apprenticeship Program in Kenya, focusing on urban slums to provide participants with opportunities to earn income, develop entrepreneurial skills, and start their own businesses. Over three months, participants work as clean energy sales agents, receiving Solar Sister’s training and earning commissions on the products they sell. At the end of the three months, these commissions enable them to purchase Solar Sister products to kickstart their clean energy businesses or use their new skills and earned commissions to pursue other endeavors.
Advancing Through Learning and Digitization
The year 2024 marked a pivotal year in our journey of learning and improvement with the launch of Solar Sister’s Organizational Learning Agenda. This initiative reflects our belief in the power of knowledge to drive innovation, empower our team, and create meaningful change.
A key focus has been evaluating how Digitization Programming boosts digital skills, self-efficacy, and business outcomes for our entrepreneurs. Over the past year of monitoring and evaluation, we’ve seen how digitization helps women’s businesses grow, increases efficiency, expands market access, and builds confidence using digital tools. This progress underscores the need for continued investment in digital training and tools to help entrepreneurs thrive.
Three key takeaways:
- Entrepreneurs with smartphones earn 80% more on average.
- Social media marketing is their most valuable digital business asset.
- Access to digital tools remains the most significant barrier to scaling their businesses.
- Equipping entrepreneurs with digital skills and tools has enhanced efficiency, expanded market access, and increased confidence by equipping entrepreneurs with digital skills and tools. Continued investment in these areas is essential to ensuring their sustained growth.
Digitization is not just a tool, it’s a key growth catalyst for women’s businesses.
Scaling Clean Cooking Solutions
Solar Sister has achieved remarkable growth in clean cookstove distribution, with a more than tenfold increase in the number of clean cookstoves distributed between 2020 and 2024. Multiple factors drove this significant growth, including the merger with Kenya, which strongly emphasized cookstove distribution and the rising demand for clean cooking solutions in Nigeria and Tanzania. The consistent increase in cookstove sales highlights the recognition of clean cooking as a critical solution for women’s economic empowerment and inclusion in this growing marketplace, climate change action, improved health, and energy poverty.
Since 2010, Solar Sister has:
Beatres Kachema’s journey
When you meet Beatres Kachema, her warm smile immediately makes you feel at home. It’s hard to imagine that she rarely left her house just a few years ago. Since joining Solar Sister Tanzania in 2018, Beatres has become a thriving entrepreneur.
Guided by her Business Development Manager, Victoria Mfinanga, she learned how to start and run a clean energy business. “My life changed completely,” says Beatres. “Now, I’m a familiar face in the community.” Recently, she expanded into a fish-frying business, selling fresh fish and bananas to evening commuters. With Victoria’s training, she evaluated the risks and profits, pricing her products thoughtfully.
Beyond her success, Beatres mentors other women, helping them join Solar Sister and grow as entrepreneurs.
Beatres participated in our advanced training, Business Booster, in 2021. In this program, entrepreneurs train in Connected Selling, Credit Benefits and Risks, Reinvesting Capital and Profits, and expanding their market, among other business topics.
