SELCO Foundation & A2EI Partnership

The needs of smallholder farmers and micro-businesses in terms of energy access and productive use appliances in India and countries in Sub Sahara Africa are often very similar.

The A2EI and Selco Foundation want to learn from each other’s wealth of experience (having worked with the needs of rural and peri-urban small businesses and farmers) to jointly create appropriate livelihood solutions.

In September 2019 a strategic partnership was initiated between A2EI and SELCO Foundation to develop, test and deploy selected solar powered efficient machines that can augment chosen agricultural value chains. The partnership also aims to establish and implement protocols for data logging and analysis on productive agri-tech applications.

In the first phase A2EI and SELCO Foundation aim to leverage each others strengths of efficient technology development and rural dissemination models by collaborating on R&D, design and deployment of solar powered energy-efficient machines for flour and spice grinding that is suited for enhancing incomes of farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, farmer producer groups etc. Three such income generating applications will be identified and developed through the partnership.

Monitoring and data logging efforts through the program will aim to provide practitioners insights on ways to optimize existing or new agri-processing solutions for small and marginal farmers. By using remote monitoring, data will be collected and used as inputs for product and system improvement. This will enable the partners to determine aspects like need-based and appropriate system design, sizing, expected repayment rate etc with more accuracy. And by using sensors to measure throughput, analysis on the efficiency of the machines under different operating conditions will help determine features like optimal operating speed and motor specifications.

The mutual work that A2EI and Selco Foundation are engaging in aims to directly benefit under-served end users by providing access to clean energy driven efficient solutions. Beyond this, the goal of the partnership is to share findings with the broader sustainable energy community, in the hope that the work, learnings and solutions can be spread to a much wider user base of smallholder farmers and micro-businesses worldwide.

Learn more about the SELCO Foundation:  www.selcofoundation.org