With GAS360, Buy Clean Cooking Fuel And Pay Later

9.7 million is the number of people that have access to cleaner cooking fuel like liquified petroleum gas in Nigeria. This gas is commonly known as cooking gas or simply gas. That is only 5% of the actual number of people who live in that country. As the world moves towards Net Zero, African governments are committed to making clean cooking accessible to everyone. The Nigerian government has also committed to ensuring that 90% of Nigerians have access to clean cooking fuels over the next decade.

In Africa, only 20% of the population currently live above the poverty line. To put this in perspective: the remaining 80% use charcoal and wood for their cooking. The effort of the African governments to make clean cooking accessible to everyone is a laudable and commendable one. The world is moving towards cleaner energy, and this is the right time to revolutionize the energy space in Africa.

Many Africans and Nigerians like to use gas. However, what is frustrating about this decision is not a lack of availability but the lack of efficiency and affordability in the LPG industry. To those who can afford to use LPG for cooking, the common complaint is inefficiency. Many marketers and salesmen have come up with solutions to the affordability challenge by selling LPG in small cylinder sizes. Yet this is not profitable to the distributors because the cost of distribution of larger cylinders is the same as the cost of distribution for smaller cylinders.

A Frustrating Experience

Take Mama Ngozi as an example. Mama Ngozi is a busy career woman who lives in Lagos-Nigeria. She has three children who are in elementary and junior high school. Mama Ngozi's husband is a trader in computer village Ikeja. Ikeja is the capital of Lagos state.

They live on the outskirts of town, so they have to leave the house early. That is so that mama Ngozi can drop the kids off at school and then find her way to the island to her event planning company.

Papa Ngozi also has a reason to leave home early too. He drops the youngest child at school on his way to work and then tries to beat the traffic to Ikeja.

Mama Ngozi only has the weekends to cook. On Saturdays, she makes different kinds of soups, except stew. Rice and stew is a festive food that she makes on Sundays. Rice and stew is the food that most Nigerian families make on Sundays.

One fateful Sunday, After mass, the family is eager to prepare Sunday lunch. Aside from it being a time to eat a special delicacy, it is also a time for the family to bond. Everybody is involved in preparing the Sunday special, and Papa Ngozi tells his funny stories. Even though they are stories that he has told a million times before.

"Oh God"! Mama Ngozi exclaims from the kitchen. "What is it"? Papa Ngozi asks as he rushes in there with onion and knife in hand. Behind him are the children, who also had ingredients that they were preparing in their hands.

"The Gas just finished! How could I not know?" she walked out of the kitchen as the children said: "sorry mummy," papa Ngozi told her not to dwell on it, as he began to call friends. He asked them if they knew anyone that sells gas on Sundays. Of course, it was from one negative response to another. Yet, Mama Ngozi is lucky. The inefficiency in the gas industry is biting her. But in comparison, she is better than Papa Olu. Papa Olu is a widower whose wife died at the early stage of their marriage. He was just 35, and she was 28. She left him with two young children.

Although the man is often the breadwinner of the family in most African homes, papa Olu's wife earned more than him while she was alive. She was a nurse, and he, a vulcanizer. After her demise, the family's income plummeted, and the cooking fuel the family could afford was sometimes charcoal and most times firewood.

After fifteen years of cooking with dirty cooking fuel for his family, Papa Olu has a stubborn cough. The cost of clean cooking gas is high in Africa. And there are many people like papa Olu that cannot afford it. There is no provision for him and other low-income earners to buy clean cooking fuels in small units that they can afford.

The use of dirty fuels causes 4.3 million deaths annually across the world. There is a record of 98,000 Nigerian women who also die annually from cooking with dirty cooking fuels. It is said that when a woman uses firewood to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it is the same as smoking 20 packets of cigarettes.

A Solution With Us

As the world is moving towards Net-Zero, emerging countries must embrace LPG as the transitional fuel to move the African continent from dirty fuel to a future powered by renewable energy in the next 30 years. LPG is well-positioned. Unlike liquid natural gas, electricity, and even mini-grids, it does not require upfront grid infrastructure to deliver to households. LPG is safe, efficient, abundantly available, and clean. It can also be transported easily in trucks and canisters without upfront grid infrastructure.

The ease to operate this business makes it attractive and enticing to invest in. But what the players in this industry fail to consider is the inefficiency in providing these services to homes. No one thinks about the frustration and embarrassment that comes with running out of cooking gas in the middle of exciting moments, and we want to fix that.

At Goods-as-a-service 360(GAS360) we set out to solve the simple problem for mama Ngozi, a busy career woman, and homemaker. We want to provide papa Olu with a pay-as-you-use service so that he discontinues using dirty gas and switch to clean gas.

With a team of professionals who are passionate about fixing this loophole, we set out to provide meters to the cylinders of every home. These meters will be connected to our system so that when the consumer is running out of cooking gas, we can detect it from our end and notify them.

This service is for the middle-class segment that can afford to purchase the gas as a whole but want to monitor so that they do not run out of gas abruptly. We also have the Buy-Now-Pay-Later services. This model allows low-income customers to purchase the gas in fractional sums. This solution will circumvent the high cost of the equipment and the fuel.

The African consumer is used to buying sachets, and we are interested in catering to that market. That is why one of the features of our services will allow consumers to buy gas in "sachet" for as low as 0.5cents.

Our Journey

The Covid situation in 2020 brought the fragilities of the informal economy to the fore with many households unable to purchase LPG or go to the bushes to get firewood. With a laptop in our hands and an idea in our head, we went to work and developed the prototype in 2 months which we called the Smart Scale. We used recyclable materials like batteries and steel and were in the Top 5 of the Nigerian Oil and Gas Hackathon and Sahara Energy Social Innovation Program.

Moving forward in 2021, we have 10 LPG SMART METERS in the beta testing mode that have undergone four iterations at the moment. They allow real-time monitoring of gas levels and enable customers to buy LPG in fractional amounts. We exhibited the meters at the National Research and Development Exhibition by the NCDMB in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State.

The data we have found is amazing. Low to middle-income households consume more LPG than high-income households because they rarely go to restaurants to eat. They do not have access to stable electricity to use freezers and microwaves to preserve their food, so they have to heat the food 3 times daily to keep it fresh. In addition, they do not have access to water heating solutions, so they boil water using the LPG.

We concluded that traditional bias like: "Firewood-cooked rice tastes better than LPG-cooked rice", is not responsible for household decisions to cook with dirty fuels. It is a logical decision they make every day to run their homes efficiently on the little money they earn.

A Room For You

The average consumption of LPG in Africa is at 5.77 thousand barrels per day. That is a large market. There is also a young population in Africa who are interested in being Gasprenuers. We at GAS360 will need these young people, as they will be the retailers who will refill the gas in homes as the consumers run out of cooking gas.

We cannot achieve this alone, and that is why we need you. The African market is a population of young people. That is a market that is excited and welcoming of innovations that are convenient and efficient. We are happy to share more with you and give you a chance to plant your investment on fertile soil.

Join us to change how energy is consumed and distributed in Africa and the world at large. Reach us on @gas360tech today. Let us do this together. There is room for you.