The Blended Capital Group believes the MWEZI model, described below, can provide the for-profit approach through affordable credit and converging technologies to supply first mile communities with enhanced basic services in a manner transforming family productivity, health and wealth.

MWEZI – Moonlight in Swahili

At its peak in August 2020, MWEZI Co., Ltd had supplied 50,000 families, some 220,000 people, around the Western Kenyan city of Kisumu, with a growing range of productive-use-energy (PuE) products.

After a decade of work, MWEZI’s monthly turn over, as the Covid Pandemic descended on the world, was $300K based on a core team of 80+ Kenyans and 400 local field agents. The business numbers building over years confirmed the MWEZI approach was proven as a profitable, stand alone, scalable business. TBCG Founder, Paul Clements-Hunt, was a minority shareholder in MWEZI and worked closely with Founder Mike Sherry, a UK-based Chartered Certified Accountant who in the early-mid 00’s initiated what became for  a time the largest clean cook stove initiative in East Africa (registered programmatic CDM project).

By 2020, operations covered a range of diverse communities around the edge of Lake Victoria and, one iconic product, nighttime fishing lights for many of the 22,000 strong fleet harvesting protein from the world’s 2nd largest freshwater lake, captured the building success of the company.

Then, in a perfect storm, the COVID Pandemic factor kicked – two issues – firstly, MWEZI’s debt provider, a wealthy former banker based in Asia, panicked as his other private equity investments went south. With no notice, on August 19, 2020, the banker withdrew the company’s critical debt facility overnight. Secondly, equity providers stopped investing. It took two years for MWEZI to die – finalised administration in the UK in 2023 –  but the withdrawal of the $1.5 million facility held the company below the waterline. MWEZI, although replacing the debt facility in Q1 2021, never fully recovered as other Pandemic factors kicked in complicating supply chain economics.

Lights of Hope

For many of these farming and fishing communities the MWEZI model, based on affordable credit, mobile money, and a convergence of digital, solar, and PuE technologies, were life changing whether in terms of farm productivity, a shift to cleaner and healthier energy, as well as providing critical evening lighting to deliver educational benefits for children. Also, for those employed directly by MWEZI, or supplying the company, dignified jobs and technical training were inbuilt.

From inception in 2011, MWEZI’s growth and development was far from a straight line and required real entrepreneurial tenacity from its visionary and driving force Mike Sherry. A key moment came in 2016, when the integration of an “on=off” technology in a range of solar driven PuE products enabled MWEZI to impose incremental pressure on non-paying customers to play catch up on payments. MWEZI’s approach was based on gentle persuasion rather than direct financial pressure and the company ethos was always to give vulnerable clients manageable options.

By the early 2020s, MWEZI’s non performing loan stats stood at less than 5% and this was commented on by prospective NYC investors as “remarkable in the US let alone for a start-up company in emerging Africa.”

A Phoenix in Brazil

As the African MWEZI wound down, Sherry and Clements-Hunt initiated a nascent exploration of whether the concept could be transported to communities in the Cerrado, the first stage of the Brazilian Amazon.

 In February 2022, working with a major Brazilian sanitation company, BRK Ambiental, the two British entrepreneurs conducted market research across 11 Brazilian communities located in an area known as Bico de Papagaio (Beak of the Parrot) in the Province of Tocantins. That exploration continues with a focus on the possibility of creating a MWEZI-model style provision of sanitation and clean cooking gas to off-grid households. The market driver of this prospective business is a 2021 legal change in Brazil requiring the country’s 40 plus major sanitation providers to provide equivalent quality services for off grid communities. Part of the project was to provide the first integration of technology with the mobile money payment system (PIX) in South America.

The working name of the “new MWEZI” is Lua e Sol or moon and sun in English.