2024 Year in Review: Strengthening Connections & Transforming Industries

As we close the chapter on 2024, we look back with pride at the strides we’ve made, be it in empowering businesses, nurturing partnerships, or fostering growth within our team. Each of the following milestones and achievements reinforce our vision of driving meaningful change across industries in emerging markets.

We are now impacting almost 6 million people by helping companies unlock access to essential products and services across underserved communities.

This year, our flexible, scalable and interoperable IT solutions reached new heights. Working alongside our clients and partners across key industries (agriculture, clean cooking, solar, access to water, sanitation, e-mobility, etc) in 39 countries, we proudly expanded our reach from 4.6 million people in 2023 to over 5.8 million people impacted as of December 2024.

Our commitment to sustainable development has also yielded impressive results: avoiding over 113,900 tons of CO2 emissions and supporting more than 2,800 jobs in emerging markets. These achievements underscore our dedication to creating transformative change and driving progress toward global sustainable development goals (SDGs).

We introduced innovative features and flexible offerings that are allowing our customers to automate more processes, deliver more value and be more efficient in doing so.  

We advanced our mission to adapt to our clients’ needs by launching PaygOps Microservices, an innovative offering that enables businesses to tailor their operational toolkits like never before. This innovation lets clients choose from a suite of comprehensive microservices that allow for streamlining critical processes and customising workflows to meet their unique requirements.

Additionally, we introduced three groundbreaking features to enhance operational efficiency:

• Offtaking Feature: Facilitating market linkages for smallholder farmers through agritech distributors.

• User Journey Editor: A no-code solution for customising user experiences and creating bespoke workflows effortlessly.

• Custom App Designer: A powerful no-code app-building tool that enables businesses to create personalised mobile applications for field agents, ensuring a focus on critical tasks.

But that’s not all! To further support our clients, we launched the exclusive PaygOps Premier Program, which provides a comprehensive onboarding experience and exclusive benefits for select new clients, mitigating the risks associated with adopting a new service or platform, covering up to $10.000 USD in initial fees (if interested, please contact us).

Our suite of open-source and interoperable tools continues to revolutionise how manufacturers, distributors, and end-users engage with Paygo solutions.

Building on the industry-wide adopted OpenPAYGO Token, as well as the rest of the OpenPAYGO Suite tools, we unveiled the OpenPAYGO Pass, a free and secure open-source technology developed with the support of longtime collaborator the EnAccess Foundation. OpenPAYGO Pass simplifies Paygo operations in low-connectivity regions by leveraging affordable RFID tags that transmit metrics and activation tokens. Supported by a free app, this solution ensures seamless data exchange, reinforcing our commitment to innovation and accessibility for underserved communities.

We further strengthened connections

In 2024, we deepened our connections with clients, partners, and our team, making it a year of much collaboration, learning, and growth.

In the field

Our field visits provided invaluable insights into our clients’ operations and their end-users’ needs. Early in the year, for instance, we visited Clean Cooking Solutions (Supamoto) in Zambia. This immersive trip took us to their headquarters in Lusaka, their pellet factory in Ndola, and the homes of their end clients. Witnessing Supamoto’s transformative impact through innovative, sustainable cookstoves and pellets was inspiring. Conversations with their staff and clients also led to the creation of the PaygOps x Supamoto Video Series, highlighting how our platform supports the democratisation of carbon credit access in the clean cooking sector.

We also engaged with a major agritech distributor during another field visit, where we pilot-tested our User Journey Editor and Custom App Designer tools. The results were remarkable:

• Customer registration time reduced from 12 minutes to just 3.

• Pickup registration time decreased from approximately 3.5 minutes to 1.5 minutes.

• Average cash sale registration in shops dropped from 2 minutes to just 1 minute.

  
  

These efficiency gains demonstrate how PaygOps drives productivity for last-mile businesses. We’re excited to see how these tools will continue transforming operations for other clients in the near future.

As a team

To nurture our team, we hosted our annual Team Gathering for the first time ever across two locations: Nairobi, Kenya, and Valencia, Spain. Over the course of three days, our team came together to brainstorm, exchange exciting ideas, and explore ways to improve our online collaboration and work dynamics. For a fully remote team like ours, having this experience proved invaluable, helping us foster a more innovative, connected, and efficient working environment to better serve our clients. Outside of work sessions, we bonded through sports, dancing, sightseeing, great food and drinks, strengthening our team spirit in true PaygOps fashion.

With Industry Partners

Industry events played a central role in 2024 as well. At the GOGLA Global Off-Grid Solar Forum & Expo in Nairobi, the premier event for the off-grid solar industry, we spent three exciting days reconnecting with partners, showcasing our innovations, meeting new players, and discussing strategies to push the industry forward and achieve SDG7 (read the highlights and watch our after movie here). Our sister brand Bridgin made a notable impact at the event. As a first-time attendee, the receivables financing platform and marketplace captured the attention of several stakeholders with its innovative approach to addressing the funding gap in the sector, showcasing its potential to drive change within the industry (learn more about Bridgin’s 2024 achievements here).

Beyond the GOGLA Forum & Expo, we participated in a host of other notable events, including: Grand Summit Africarena (Cape Town), Mercy Corps Agrifin (Nairobi), Africa Food Systems Forum (AFS) (Kigali), GOGLA’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) (Amsterdam), World Impact Summit (Bordeaux), Sankalp Africa Summit (Nairobi) and Africa Tech Summit (Nairobi).

Through these engagements, we not only showcased our solutions but also forged new synergies and reaffirmed our commitment to driving meaningful impact in emerging markets across essential sectors like agriculture, clean cooking, microfinance, and others.

Igniting the Path Forward…

As we step into 2025, our commitment to driving innovation, fostering collaboration, and leveraging technology to bridge gaps and create new opportunities for all remains unwavering. We are more determined than ever to push the boundaries of what’s possible, empowering businesses and underserved communities with the tools they need to thrive. 

Thank you all for your support during this transformative 2024! 

About PaygOps:

Solaris Offgrid’s flagship fintech software, PaygOps, enables credit to be provided to the bottom of the pyramid for essential products like solar home systems, agri-inputs, water pumps. The end customers pay incrementally via mobile money under a PAYGO model. PaygOps provides the software infrastructure to manage the contracts, payments and related communication for the local retailers of such products. Our affordable modular and interoperable solution connects energy and payment methods (Pay-as-you-go, mobile money) to a suite of enterprise applications that allows the smooth management of lease financing and field operations, while providing key financial data and metrics to investors.