A Solar Off-Grid Software: The Making of Infrastructures, Markets and Consumers ‘Beyond Energy’

Abstract

Riedke engages with the processes of digitization that accompany the selling of solar off-grid products to the so-called ‘unelectrified poor’. The chapter draws attention to how the selling of solar goes hand in hand with the establishment of people’s ‘credit worthiness’, aimed at advancing financial inclusion in markets beyond solar. From an ethnographic perspective, the chapter engages with a German-Kenyan solar start-up and a software it has designed to manage sales processes to keep track of current and future customers. Exploring the details of this software, the chapter contributes to our understanding of how solar power is provided to meet a basic need, a most basic level of human well-being, but simultaneously also to form new consumer subjects for new markets.