Boldewijn Sloet

General Manager BASE Technologies & Early stage investor Barefoot Power

His Story

Boldewijn Sloet is a Dutch investor and entrepreneur. After completing his law studies in Amsterdam he got inspired by the story of Grameen Phone in Bangladesh, which took him on a different career path. Smart business ideas with massive development impact became his passion and he looked for a venture where he could achieve this. In 2006 he met the founders of Barefoot Power, an Australian startup company with the goal to get 1 million people safe, clean and affordable lighting by 2010.

Boldewijn became an investor in Barefoot Power and took up management of its first African subsidiary in Uganda, BASE Technologies. After 2 years, the business model has proven to be successful and is ready to be expanded all across Africa. Together with the founders of Barefoot Power, Boldewijn is preparing this operation which will start in early 2011. The goal is to reach 10 million people in Africa with safe, clean and affordable energy solutions by 2015.

Description of Organization

Barefoot Power is a for profit company aimed at establishing a mass market transformation in the energy sector by replacing kerosene based lights with better solar powered alternatives. The products power LED and fluorescent lights, but also charge mobile phones radios. Product design, manufacturing and distribution is done from a “Bottom Of the Pyramid” (BOP) perspective. At the latest World Bank/IFC Lighting Africa event in Nairobi in May 2010, the Barefoot Power product range was awarded first prizes in three of the four categories tested and second prize in one category, beating all international competition including multinationals like Philips and Osram.

Since its inception in June 2008, the subsidiary BASE Technologies has reached over 200.000 Ugandans with alternatives for kerosene and phone charging solutions. In Kenya, a similar Barefoot Power subsidiary has reached the same amount of people and is also operating at a profit. With two profitable businesses established, Barefoot Power is ready to expand its horizon to the rest of Africa.

Goal

In Uganda, only 7% of the people are connected to the national grid, leaving 93% without access to electricity. All across Africa, this problem is the same. People are dependent on dangerous, dirty and expensive kerosene lamps for lighting. Furthermore, they do not have electricity to charge mobile phones and radios, pushing them to expensive and far away battery charging stations or use of polluting dry cell batteries.

Barefoot Power wants to expand its business model across the African continent by combining its award winning products, innovative distribution, and access to financing towards a mass market transformation in the African energy sector. Access to modern sources of energy will have great impact on education, small businesses, health and safety and disposable household incomes.

Help Needed

• Corporate communications assistance with staff deployed around the globe, communication is hard to establish. Informing investors, customers, policy makers and stakeholders of our work is increasingly important.
• Ambitious entrepreneurs interested in starting a business in Africa.
• Public platform to build awareness for the project Barefoot Power welcomes any who wants to raise awareness for their goal by putting it on a blog, website or other public platform.
• Contacts with major Africa based multinationals like telcos and consumer goods distributors.
• Corporate Social Responsibility partnerships (e.g. with European companies).
• Monitoring and evaluation assistance to conduct impact assessments in the various countries of operation. The business and products are beneficial to development on different levels. Measuring the education health, and income impacts will show that this mass market transformation contributes to almost all of the Millennium Development Goals.
• Access to large scale education projects already done in Africa, for example by organizations such as UNICEF, War Child and the Clinton and Gates Foundations.

His TEDx-Talk

Progress

Here’s a quote from Boldewijn about what has happened after his pitch in Amsterdam:

It’s crazy how excited people are about the work we are doing. Every single day since TEDxChange, I have received offers for help, people applying for jobs or inquiring about other possibilities to get involved in our business. I am engaged in talks with some very good entrepreneurs that could play a role in expansion, we are making good progress on launching several sustainable school projects in Uganda and I have received interesting ideas to generate publicity. The biggest challenge is following up with the overwhelming amount of supporters.