Blog

New Teammate: Gussai

This is a bit overdue, but we’d like to welcome Gussai Sheikheldin to our team.

Gussai Intro

Gussai has been working with us for about a month as a Product Development Fellow with a primary focus on our Multicrop Thresher, next-in-line for our product portfolio expansion. He brings extensive international experience, as he was born in Omdurman, Sudan, has lived across three separate continents – Africa, Asia, and North America. He loves that GCS resembles an innovation hive, dedicated to realizing technology responses to local problems, though he could do without the frequent Internet stalls. He spends his free time watching documentaries, reading a plethora of books, and listening to music from all over the world while also working on his PhD thesis on appropriate technology. His advice? ‘Conventional wisdom’ is an oxymoron!

Debbie | Arusha, Tanzania

Featured Rafiki: Elinipa

Things have been very busy around GCS lately with the kickoff of the Rafiki distribution network. We have recently received a fantastic grant (details to be revealed in a later entry), have welcomed new members to our team (more details later), and are steadily expanding our product line (you guessed it, details later). Basically, GCS is getting bigger!

The Rafiki program has been extremely successful. We began with 20-30 sales during the month of October 2012 (our pilot month), and last month, we sold over 160! One particular Rafiki we’d like to highlight is this young woman:

Elinipa Laiser

who, with her persuasive charm, managed to sell every member of a village group a solar light – that’s twenty lights in one go! Because of such success stories like Elinipa, we’re planning our expansion to the Morogoro region from our Arusha pilot.

With the help of our Rafiki, we have managed to directly reach out to villages to not only provide helpful products but also to close our feedback loop. Our frequent meetings with our Rafiki give us the chance to hear their suggestions and allow them to relay the opinions of the villagers back to us. We’re very excited to use this feedback to further improve our product portfolio. If you would like to help us cataylze a villager’s entrepreneurial career, please get in touch!

That’s it for now :) Stay tuned for all the details.

Debbie | Arusha, TZ

New Shipment!

Yesterday, we received a brand-new shipment of 8,000 solar lights. Demand for our excellent lights has been high, which is no surprise given their  no-risk investment: Not only does our SunKing Pro charges cell phones, but it also provides enough energy savings within six months to pay for itself. With its one-year warranty, you are literally guaranteed value!

shipment anticipation truck

Eagerly anticipating the opening of the delivery truck!

shipment_truck

Working in the rain to move all these boxes from the truck into our storage container.

shipment_container

Creepy container lit up by our powerful SunKing Pro. We brave the darkness to bring you light.

shipment moving

We’re all about teamwork at GCS.

shipment_office

A wall of solar lanterns boxes: a beautiful sight to see. Even more beautiful unboxed in your homes :)

Debbie | Arusha, Tanzania

 

Sharing Experience with Community Enterprise Solutions

Over the past few months, GCS has been refining its Rafiki model, where we train GCS village agents to become technology access points in the village.  These past two weeks, GCS had the privilege of welcoming Maria Luz, Giambartolomei, Andean Director of Community Enterprise Solutions, to Tanzania.
She came here to share her experiences in working with the MicroConsignment Model in Ecuador.  While she was here, we did quite a few village visits, and for us, it was a fascinating experience, as rather than just selling solar lanterns, we experimented with reading glasses, which they considered their biggest high impact product where the need was big, the price affordable, and adoption rate high.
After all, when you toss on a paper of reading glasses, suddenly, a fuzzy world comes into focus. Her visit was packed with many field days and a bold pilot to understand how reading glasses could drastically change the market.  Our biggest takeaways from Maria were:
  • Entrepreneurs are best supported when we can help them with their campaigns and help link them to existing markets, such as savings groups, hospitals, teachers, and other active groups.
  • Entrepreneurs should be viewed more as community advisors rather than salesmen.  When our entrepreneurs gave free eye exams, they seemed to be immediately perceived as someone special, someone who could be trusted within the community because they were offering a service that is so important to the lives of their clients.
  • Reading eyeglasses are a product that people can easily pay for.  With all our pricing below $10 for every pair of eyeglasses, we were amazed that we could sell dozen reading eyeglasses in a a matter of hours (the only reason it took hours was because every eye exam to fit our customers required 5-10 minutes, and we had 40 people come for our first eye exam campaign.
We look forward to seeing how we will be able to integrate this in our programs, but for sure, we are going to take it slowly as the support needed for such a model is much more intensive than we thought!  Whether we start selling reading eyeglasses, we are excited by what’s ahead.
Jodie | Arusha, Tanzania