{"id":1310,"date":"2020-04-30T11:43:28","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T09:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sonnenseite.com\/energy\/relief-needs-of-african-solar-companies-survey-results-from-east-africa.html"},"modified":"2020-07-27T16:20:16","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T14:20:16","slug":"relief-needs-of-african-solar-companies-survey-results-from-east-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sonnenseite.com\/en\/energy\/relief-needs-of-african-solar-companies-survey-results-from-east-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Relief needs of African solar companies – Survey results from East Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

A large part of the off-grid industry in Africa and Asia consists of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). These SMEs form the backbone of the off-grid industry. But they have different demands, needs and challenges than the internationally established companies in the industry.<\/p>\n

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What is true in European countries is also true in Africa: rescue and support measures for larger companies in Europe are often not suitable for helping small companies through the crisis. Or to be more specific: M-KOPA and Greenlight Planet have access to a wider and robust financial rescue instruments comparted to a typical locally active solar craftsman with four employees.<\/p>\n

The difference is obvious in the case of loans often offered by Relief Funds: these are hardly helpful for small companies, as they run the risk of not being able to repay the loan due to their low profitability. As a result, the current crisis would simply be postponed until later or extended indefinitely. Morever, eligibility criteria for such funds tend to disqualify the participation of typical SMEs, yet they remain the most vulnerable and needy, before, during and post-crisis events such as Covid-19. Therefore, in addition to loans, further support measures specially tailored to SMEs are being set up in many economic sectors worldwide – but not (yet) in the off-grid-industry.<\/p>\n

In order to develop an relief instrument tailored to the needs of African SMEs in the off-grid sector, it is first necessary to precisely identify the needs. Sun-Connect has therefore conducted a survey<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>of East African solar companies, in which dozens of companies from five countries participated. Below is summary of distribution of responses by country:<\/p>\n

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\n\u00a9\u00a0sun-connect-news.org<\/p>\n

The results of our survey provide clear indications of what support might look like. Here are the three most important findings:<\/p>\n

1. The greatest assets in each company are the people<\/strong><\/p>\n

An overwhelming majority (99.4%) of the companies stated that financial support to finance employee salaries (40% subsidy over 6 months) would be of great help to them.<\/p>\n

Such support would be inspired by the payment of short-time allowances, which are widespread in Europe – with great economic success. This means a temporary subsidy of the salaries in order to avoid having to lay off employees and send them into unemployment. But also in order not to lose the most important asset of the company and to be able to restart immediately after the COVID-19 crisis.<\/p>\n

What is the likely amoung of funds are we are talking about here? A 40% coverage of the salaries over a period of six months would in most cases result in a subsidy of between USD 1,000 and USD 5,000 (depending on the size of the company). This is actually a manageable amount to maintain jobs and the SME’s ability to sustain operatiions during the Covid-19 crisis.<\/p>\n

2. Important for maintaining business activity: customers and orders<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second most important support, according to the survey responses, is to enable business activity, with two options named equally strong, each with 42.3%:<\/p>\n