Public Funding for Wellspring Development Capital Limited

**Project vision**: To develop a solar milling solution that can out compete one of the largest single stationary uses of fossil fuels in off-grid areas of rural Africa -- diesel powered mills. The project will test and prepare for the rapid scaling of the most efficient, smart, and affordable solar grain milling machine ever developed -- the Agsol _MicroMill_ -- by removing technical, commercial, and financial bottlenecks. The MicroMill functions as an anchor load to a Tier 4 solar system that can deliver a range of other energy offtake benefits. **Key Objectives:** To scale the MicroMill, we need to 1) optimise product design; 2) prepare for mass manufacturing to drive down costs 3) design the hardware and knowledge for a fair financing product to make it accessible to the financially excluded, and 4) prepare a commercial go-to-market strategy. **Focus areas:** The experimental project will develop Agsol's manufacturing capabilities to prepare for mass manufacturing scales of economy, and develop and test IoT integrated product financing tools. These trials will initially focus on Kenya, and then expand during the project into 5 additional countries. The results of this project will support a commercial business case and product roadmap that can attract investment capital to scale beyond the project period. During the 18 month project over 500 MicroMills will be manufactured and sold under financing, delivering over 300 kW of new installed solar capacity, avoid nearly 400,000 litres of diesel, 1,000 tonnes of CO2, liberate 3 million hours of women's time, and provide a host of other social impact benefits. **Project innovation:** This project will take the most innovative small solar grain milling machine to the next level ready for commercial scale-up. Along with finalising the core product design for mass manufacturing, the project will develop the hardware, software and knowledge that enables novel 'pay-as-you-earn' capabilities. Integrated smart tech and IoT technologies will monitor power consumption in real-time, being a proxy for income generation, and apply a variable financing mechanism so that high utilisation users pay faster than low utilisation customers. This approach caters for a broad customer base, especially those from lower socioeconomic areas. We are not familiar with any other productive use appliance company offering such customer-centric inclusive financing.