M-KOPA lets people who earn daily pay for solar power daily. It started in Nairobi and has lent over 1.5 billion dollars.
Founded by people who had worked on M-Pesa, M-KOPA built a pay-as-you-go model for households that earn income day by day.
M-KOPA takes its name from the Swahili for “borrow”. In 2010, Jesse Moore and Nick Hughes, with banker Chad Larson, founded the start-up in Nairobi that became M-KOPA the following year. Hughes had previously set up and run M-Pesa at Vodafone, and Moore had also worked there while completing his MBA. Larson and Moore were fellow MBA students at Oxford.
A model that fits the customer
The company’s financing is based on daily repayments, fitting the cash flow of customers who earn their income daily. It launched commercially in late 2012. By 2015 it said it had powered 150,000 households in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, with revenue over 40 million dollars, and estimated that 80 percent of its customers lived on less than 2 dollars a day.
Scale
By January 2018 it had wired at least 500,000 homes and sold about 90,000 solar rechargeable televisions. It expanded to Nigeria in July 2021 and operates in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and South Africa. By 2024 it had extended over 1.5 billion dollars in credit to more than 5 million customers.
Founders can read it as a design lesson: when customers are paid daily, a product that is paid daily can reach people that monthly credit cannot.
