Energizing Africa

When Joshua Pierce was 6 years old, his father moved his family from the relatively comfortable Southern California suburbs to a then-untamed, rugged and rural area of Butte County.

“He was kind of a back-to-the-land hippie in the 1970s, and he bought a rattlesnake-infested piece of land about 20 miles outside of Oroville,” Pierce recalled during a recent phone interview. “There was no power up there, so we made do with a propane generator and some old car batteries while we built the house. As soon as the first solar subsidies happened, we jumped on it, and my father put in a solar system that ran our house for several years.”

Thirty-odd years later, Pierce found himself packing up his wife and two young children for their own foray into even more remote environs—the East African country of Tanzania. While his father was driven by individual self-determination, the younger Pierce’s goal was to help others for whom living off the grid is not a matter of choice, but circumstance.

Pierce is a co-founder of Off-Grid Electric, a solar-as-a-service company whose mission is to bring light and energy to some of the world’s poorest people. He explained there are 1.5 billion people in the world living without power—mostly in poor, developing nations—with 800 million of those in Africa. Tanzania alone is home to more than 8 million off-grid households.

In East Africa, Pierce said, these off-grid populations burn kerosene lamps, use “cheap Chinese flashlights” and batteries, or heavily polluting diesel generators for light and electricity, with the prohibitive cost of cleaner power a barrier to greater development.

“Our price point is accessible to anyone making a dollar a day or more,” Pierce said, explaining most Tanzanians spend about $1.50 a week on kerosene. Off-Grid Electric installs mostly small-scale solar systems and all the necessary accessories (lights, power outlets, etc.) for homes and businesses, then charges $1.25 a week for unlimited use of the energy generated.

“It’s all about providing the right kind of power for the right price,” Pierce said.

Pierce graduated from Chico State with a degree in construction management and building science and did his post-graduate work at the University of California Los Angeles. He said he “shared a collective passion to see renewable energy, and solar energy specifically, redefine the way people use, consume and access electricity in the 21st century” with friend and fellow entrepreneur F. Xavier Helgesen. Helgesen and Off-Grid Electric’s third co-founder, Erica Mackey, were attending Oxford University in England, and the three collaborated for a business competition in 2011.

“It was one of those things like that show Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas and all the venture capitalists publicly humiliate them in front of an audience,” Pierce recalled. Most of the other entrants had active, working start-ups, while the Off-Grid Electric crew had just a PowerPoint presentation and written business plan. They still won.

Within months, Pierce, his wife, Keara, daughter Mikayla and son Riland (now 11 and 7 years old, respectively) were settling in outside the Tanzanian city of Arusha, where they spent the next two years. Today, the Pierce family lives back in the Chico area, though Joshua travels to Africa about six times a year, and makes an annual month-long sojourn there with the whole family. The Pierces are heading to Africa for an extended stay in July.

Off-Grid Electric began providing service to its first 500 customers in 2013. In the last 12 months, that customer base has grown to approximately 21,000. He said that’s just the beginning—though currently only in Tanzania, Pierce and his partners plan to expand to other African countries in the not-too-distant future. Pierce shared his lofty overall vision, that in 10 years Off-Grid Electric and other companies like it can help bring power to the entire world.

Off-Grid Electric currently has 110 full-time employees, 300 independent sales agents, and about 100 service outlets, including storefronts in bigger cities and kiosks in remote village marketplaces. The company’s investors include Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Paul Allen (Microsoft Corp. co-founder) and Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), as well as Solar City, the largest provider of solar-as-a-service in the United States. Pierce believes that, with the huge market in developing Africa, Off-Grid Electric could be the biggest provider of solar-as-a-service in the world in just a few years.

When Off-Grid Electric expands into new areas and communities, Pierce and his cohorts meet with tribal leaders. He said conducting business on African terms is important to the company, and distinguishes it from other foreign companies looking to make a quick buck.

As for balancing the company’s altruistic goals and sound business practices, Pierce offered his perspective: “There’s a need for both philanthropy and market-based solutions in developing countries. In situations where communities are in crisis—for example, there’s no clean water, or they’re in a conflict zone—we absolutely need nonprofit organizations and governmental bodies to secure the basic needs of those vulnerable populations.

“But we also believe those populations will always remain vulnerable until they can engage with more robust economic activity,” he continued. “Without energy, opportunities for economic growth and any level of prosperity or sustainability are limited.”

On a personal level, Pierce said living in Africa has been “the most richly rewarding, but challenging” thing he could have done with his family.

“The people here are extremely warm, friendly and community-focused,” Pierce said. “It’s given our family an appreciation of how lucky and blessed we are to be born in the West, but also an appreciation for how people rely on each other when they don’t have modern-day technology.”