Smartphone4good
Smartphones4good incentivizes corporations and consumers to donate their hibernating smartphones to digitalize and finance African women entrepreneurs. S4G co-ordinates collection, grading, data erasure, refurbishing and sale of these smartphones. The highest value phones are to be sold in the EU with partners. The phones with high use value are provided to African women entrepreneurs on affordable lease basis. They are the backbones of their societies spending 90% of their income on their families. By way of digitalizing and empowering them with credit history their economic standing and access to information.
There are 700 million phones hibernating in the EU and 300 million adults in Africa are not digitally included. Smartphones4good is a software and a partner ecosystem that bridges this gap. Unlike any other recycling or donation program we provide a secure and trustworthy process of decluttering the homes while providing access to digital life and not emitting greenhouse gases
According to research 15% of phones are recycled and another 15% refurbished for resale. Many are kept as backup phones, many are broken - Millions of phones have no longer a resale or repurpose value in the EU, however, the phones have high use value in Africa. By reusing the high quality phones that have no longer appeal in the EU bring an extended life time value to the smartphone. Further, each phone donated is equipped with tracking so end of life can be managed in ecological and sustainable fashion.
Our focus will be in business development to onboard corporate donors in the EU - we start in the following markets where we already have partners and where we have received in donations 1) Germany, 2) Sweden and 3) Finland, we will add Spain in June. In Africa our focus is on 1) Cameroon, 2) Nigeria and 3) Zambia where we already have delivered devices - we will add Rwanda and Kenya as we have established partners in these markets. We already are in the market with a value chain in place from the donations in Germany, Sweden and Finland to lease in Cameroon, Nigeria, Zambia and Vietnam.
We establish easy steps for donors to give away their hibernated smartphones to a trusted partner. We grade the phones for further processing, reselling, refurbishing, recycling or reuse. The reused phones and the value created from circular model are used to cover operational costs and margin. Customers in Africa lease phones from our local partners who take care of distribution and reverse logistics to graceful end of life to recycling of the phones after their use and refurbish value has eroded.
Our distribution in Africa already exists with the reverse logistics. In the EU we established the first partnerships that cover resell, refurbishment and recycling of used smartphones. We also have the first 5000 phones from a major corporation for grading and erasing. Our technology automates grading and erasing data on the phones and it optimizes value creation for each hibernated phone.
Other solutions do not call for the hidden motives that create the hibernation problem. Others do not consider the reuse value of many phones, rather they are dismissed into early recycling. No other solution has the ecological and ethical end of life covered in Africa - through our lease program we follow each device until end of life.
No other solution has the value chain from donor to second life in Africa with lease, lease to own and reverse logistics once phone's life ends. The business opportunity has arisen from Aion Sigma's presence in Nigeria since 2017 and Zambia since 2019. Aion Sigma has enabled pay-as-you-go smartphone solution for new phones in partnership with Nigeria's largest telcos and banks. Our platform there is fully operational, completing everything from import of phones to the country, onboarding lease customers, device management with 7000+ customers already. We have a partnership in Zambia and Cameroon.
The need arose as the working capital requirement of new phones is much higher and smaller partners who are more agile in addressing the market do not have the capacity to run an inventory of new phones. The revenues we make from refurbishers and recycling companies and from the reuse value which is unlocked via leasing the phones at affordable rates to our partners in Africa.
- Enable small and new businesses, especially in untapped communities, to prosper and create good jobs through access to capital, networks, and technology
700 million phones hibernate at homes in the EU. In Africa 300 million adults lack a smartphone. Internet via the phones is key to civic participation, business, families, education, health, and leads to good jobs.
They lack smartphone because of high initial cost. Our team Aion Sigma has been solving the problem of affordable smartphones in Africa for 3+ years. We make phones affordable simply via fair finance. Instead of paying it off, you pay it over time. We came up with the idea to bridge sustainably the abundance of old phones in Europe with those excluded in Africa.
- Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several communities, which is poised for further growth
- A new business model or process
- Corporate partners and smartphone resellers in Europe to donate used phones towards our cause
- Identify logistics partners and integrate our user experience with them seamlessly
- Invite more people and corporations to send the phones to us
- Samsung, Huawei, Apple, HMD etc. to work on a special price in Africa with their resellers so we can purchase phone most efficiently
- Samsung We support Knox to secure the phones, but we don't have a price that works with African entrepreneurs
- Banks and impact finance We are early-stage tech company and are not bankable by normal criteria of banking. We know how people behave with financed smartphones and solar panels; thus we are open for impact bond to lease phones in Africa. We are already in the market in Nigeria, Zambia and soon in Cameroon. Our solution could bridge digital exclusion gap also in Europe for those without credit score/history.
- Academia - research paper Our #smartphones4good-s4g project has identified some research that indicates 15% of used phones in the EU are not recycled and that there are upto 700 million phones in our drawers. We are running a survey on the motives of people to keep their phones and how they would prefer to donate them to advance women entrepreneurship/Covid battle. The questionnaire is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Mg99TauslHirjREtExuJZwoi0j20fSWIja2zyqlJomQ/ It would be great if we found a researcher to help us turn the background research we find and our questionnaire to a research paper with us as co-author.
We built a woocommerce based online shop to sell the phones prior to the hackathon. At EUvsVirus we went over the user journeys and extended our survey - based on those we created onboarding flow to donate the phone.We did carry interview with potential partners in Rwanda and Mozambique during the hackathon to understand and tune our approach towards the women entrepreneurs who will be able to improve the life of many in their families and communities.
We already have been able to post on our site the first phones donated to us.
And the onboarding flow is ready for more! We added also some UI flows
that help with one of the big fears people have with their old phones - We wipe the phone clean before it is sold further. The support we have received in accolades tells us that we are onto something big.
First phones are to be in use in Bamenda and Limbe in Cameroon by end of the Month
We have agreed on 15th of May that we will with Ebase also based in Bamenda, Cameroon smartphones for pregnant women and doctors to educate on COVID and other motherhood, nursing related content and support http://www.ebaseafrica.org/about
- Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
- Behavioral Technology
- Big Data
- Blockchain
- GIS and Geospatial Technology
- Imaging and Sensor Technology
- Internet of Things
- Software and Mobile Applications
On the 4th of March Aion Sigma hosted Empower Africa with Impact Business stage talks as a part of the Helsinki Nordic Impact Week.
Susanne Hannestad, the CEO of Fintech Mundi, walks-and-talks financial inclusion and is also mentoring us and the other few lucky teams at MasterCard Lighthouse MASSIV Programme. She came over from Oslo to focus our attention, once again, on the importance of financial inclusion to the global economy. Fintech for All: From access to Economic Empowerment.
Why does financial inclusion matter? Take a moment to stop and think about that:
- Even at this very moment there’s nearly 2 billion people who still don’t have access to financial services
- 3 billion people who are still uninsured
- 80% of the financial transactions done around the world are made using cash.
Since 2011 the share of adults with an account has steadily increased. For example in most of Africa as a whole the amount has increased from 23% of people in 2011 to 43% in 2017 (source: 2017 Findex). This may not seem as much to some people, but it does mean that we are headed in the right direction towards financial inclusion and banking for everyone. However, Susanne highlights, nearly 50% of bank and mobile money accounts are dormant. The financial access exists, but clearly not on a daily, ongoing basis.
A system that works
in, for example, in the Nordic countries can not be implanted into a
country such as Cameroon and expected to work similarly. There should be
shared goals to pursue. The cost of the finance should be reduced and
tools should be user-friendly. It’s also important to keep it culturally
relevant. It’s also good to keep in mind that it’s not only about
the economy – but also about the people who will benefit from it.
Aion
Sigma empowers African entrepreneurs through access to financial and
digital (smartphone) loans. By 2020 we have helped more than 10,000
people in Kenya, Zambia, Namibia and Tanzania.
- For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
The team comprises of company's serial entrepreneur CEO Mr. Jari Ala-Ruona (Finland), CTO Radu Ancuta (Romania), COO Joakim Hedenstedt (Sweden),Data Analytics. Mr. Hien Nguyen, Program manager Mrs. Jennifer Kutvonen (Finland) and Ms. Anna Georgeoudis (Switzerland). The core team has worked together for a decade with Mr. Ala-Ruona's other business. They have enabled and delivered in Nigeria smartphone finance to 7000 customers in partnership with Telco, bank, OEMs and local refurbishment companies.
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We solve user, technology and business challenges others consider impossible. We have
worked together for 10 years and can exit.
- Corporate partners and smartphone resellers in Europe to donate used phones towards our cause
- Identify logistics partners and integrate our user experience with them seamlessly
- Invite more people and corporations to send the phones to us
- Samsung, Huawei, Apple, HMD etc. to work on a special price in Africa with their resellers so we can purchase phone most efficiently
- Samsung We support Knox to secure the phones, but we don't have a price that works with African entrepreneurs
- Banks and impact finance We are early-stage tech company and are not bankable by normal criteria of banking. We know how people behave with financed smartphones and solar panels; thus we are open for impact bond to lease phones in Africa. We are already in the market in Nigeria, Zambia and soon in Cameroon. Our solution could bridge digital exclusion gap also in Europe for those without credit score/history.
- Academia - research paper Our #smartphones4good-s4g project has identified some research that indicates 15% of used phones in the EU are not recycled and that there are upto 700 million phones in our drawers. We are running a survey on the motives of people to keep their phones and how they would prefer to donate them to advance women entrepreneurship/Covid battle.
- Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)
There are some web technology development needs mainly for partners so they can log-in and choose which phones to purchase from us for resale, refurbishment, lease or recycle. Also the grading and erasing process would be faster with a diagnostic tool that we have designed, but not implemented yet. The price tag on these developments is in the 50,000 EUR range or equivalent of 12 man months. We will invest in two facilities to grade and erase the phones - Spain (proximity to volume) and Finland (proximity to our recycling partner) - these facilities will initially cost 3,000 EUR each in fixed cost. 1,000 phones a month will bring the business to a break-even point - this speed we expect to run late 2020 with a very fast growth in 2021 to process 20,000 phones a month with revenue of 5 m EUR a year.
