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LancePodstrong [soylentnews.org] writes:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2015/0125/Africa-s-quiet-solar-revolution [csmonitor.com]

[O]ne afternoon, the Noahs had an unexpected knock on the door. An agent for a new electrical company called M-POWER said that, for a sign-up fee of only 10,000 shillings ($6), he could install a fully functioning solar home system in their house – enough to power several LED lights and a radio. The payoff was immediate. While Noah used to spend $18 a month on kerosene, she now pays a monthly average of $11 for her solar lighting, and she no longer has to go into town to charge her cellphone.
...
CGAP sees such technology as allowing developing countries to carve out an energy future that is smarter, cheaper, and cleaner than the one the West pursued decades ago. As energy consultant Julian Popov put it in a recent opinion piece he wrote for Al Jazeera, most African countries never did string phone lines to every home and business – and in the end, they didn’t have to. Just as African mobile-phone networks skipped the land-line phase, he believes that African solar companies could bypass the fossil fuel era.
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Investors as far off as Silicon Valley are starting to take notice of the technology. More than $45 million flowed into the off-grid solar sector in the first four months of 2014. M-POWER’S parent company, Off-Grid Electric, completed a $7 million round of funding in March, with Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, the US solar firm SolarCity, and Omidyar Network as lead investors. In February, M-KOPA Solar, a Kenyan pay-as-you-go company, announced that it had raised $20 million to fund the expansion of its customer base – a record amount for the sector.

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