Stage of Innovation: MVP (You have a product ready to go to the market)

Problem: About 100 million people in Nigeria live with the problem of energy poverty and lack of access to clean, affordable, and reliable power. The majority of those without access to power are smallholder farmers who supply most of the food we consume and practice rain-fed farming but can no longer farm profitably due to climate change. The effects of climate change which include droughts, flooding and intermittent rainfall have made rain-fed agricultural practice which is being practiced by most farmers in the agrarian communities in Nigeria practically unsustainable and has made their livelihoods worse off. Making it worse is the lack of access to reliable and cost-effective electricity access to power irrigation and crop processing to adapt to climate change. More so, the few farmers that could afford diesel or petrol-powered irrigation pumps and power generators emit huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere thereby compounding the issues of climate change. Our solution to the problem is called MoPo (Mobile Power), an electric mobile solar plus storage energy system for powering agricultural irrigation and providing energy access that is engineered, trademarked, and patented by Ceneco Green Power. It enables the movement of solar power to farms and back home, providing on-demand power wherever it is needed. The solution is specifically designed for cooperatives and community groups with a pay-as-you-grow model. The users, whether farmers or community groups, can drive MoPo to the farm to irrigate their crops or power productive uses such as grain threshing. Afterward, they can bring MoPo back home to power their homes, businesses, and community facilities such as hospitals, water pumps, streetlights, crop processing, food production, and other uses as needed. By providing access to affordable and reliable energy, MoPo can adapt the farmers to the catastrophic effects of climate change and increasing farmers' household disposable incomes by over 500%. This is achieved by no longer relying on rain-fed agriculture and being able to grow high-value crops year-round with increased yields. Furthermore, our solution allows farming households to gain access to clean energy for productive uses like milling, threshing, domestic use, cottage industry needs, and powering their businesses. Overall, MoPo is engineered to improve productivity and income, enhance resilience, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and limit the catastrophic effects of climate change on agrarian communities.

Unique Selling Point: The people and communities are mostly rural, off-grid, and peri-urban. The communities are majorly agrarian, and the people are mostly farmers who grow crops using rain and manual watering as a means of livelihood. The use of electric mobility solution to provide reliable clean energy solutions for agricultural irrigation and energy access that is tailored to the context of the users is unique and innovative as it enables the smallholder farmers, the majority of who do not own their farmland and therefore cannot have standalone solar power for irrigation installed on the insecure rented farmland to access reliable and affordable solar-powered irrigation. Our energy access solution will unleash the economic potential of businesses and the community of intervention, and significantly improve health, education, women’s empowerment, and environmental outcomes. For the farmers, especially the smallholders who are wallowing in poverty despite their hardworking nature, this would mean access to irrigation system to adapt to climate change and transitions from subsistence farming to profitable agricultural practice, solar energy access enables food processing to reduce post-harvest losses, increased productivity, increased disposable income that would help socio-economic development with attendant improved food and nutritional security.