PicoPV Field Tests of GTZ EnDev

How much are users willing to pay?

The willingness to pay for PicoPV products in general, and for certain lamp models in particular, differed enormously between the countries. African users indicated a higher willingness to pay than users in Bolivia and Nicaragua (again, leaving much room for future validation of applied methods and ways to account for potential behavioural differences between survey countries). The figures obtained through Dutch auctions indicate a WTP of 50-90 USD for lamps of the highest value class from a consumers’ perspective. Lanterns falling into a medium value category were bought at 25- 50 USD. The remaining lanterns were sold for 5-25 USD. In spite of these high willingness to pay indications, a central finding from all the country surveys was that many households at the bottom of the income pyramid, which are in fact the main target population for PicoPV lamps, often lack the required cash availability. Even though the purchase of a lamp would pay off within a few months due to savings on running costs of conventional lighting solutions, consumers, notably in rural areas, mostly do not have the cash available to pay the upfront investment and have no access to financial services which could support by-passing this problem. This is a major a hurdle for the large-scale distribution of PicoPV lamps in least developed countries. This is particularly true for the more expensive PicoPV lamp models, which range between 80 and 150 US$ per piece.
A consumer credit scheme piloted in Uganda suggests that offering the possibility of payment in rates enhances affordability of the lamps by rural households tremendously. The willingness to pay (WTP) figures collected in the GTZ PicoPV field survey by far exceed the respective figures resulting from household surveys under the Lighting Africa Market Research programme. This high deviation may be partly due to the very different research approach used by Lighting Africa in this part of the survey, where households were asked to indicate their WTP statements for different lamp types without having had a chance to test-use them.