Hot or Cold, Nexleaf is There

“Wood or cow dung cakes under mud stoves in their homes” – that is how Vijay Mahajan says the world’s poorest 3 billion still cook, in his book Digital Leapfrogs. Even though the benefits of switching to cleaner stoves is evident – both to the individuals and the environment – nothing much has changed in the last 30 years. Why not? The reasons include inertia, newer stoves not being designed for how poor women actually cook, limited financing options, and no repair or maintenance services.

 

In India, one recent attempt at addressing this problem is by Nexleaf. In addition to means like providing loans, it uses digital technology to attack the problem. The company calls it StoveTrace. A sensor is attached to the stove that registers (1) when the stove is in use, and (2) temperature of the fire. This sensor connects to a device on the wall that records the data and sends it onwards to Nexleaf via good old phone lines.

 

Nexleaf uses this data to identify whether a stove needs repair, and sends a technician proactively (Women in rural areas don’t exactly call service centers). Or the company waits for enough issues to accumulate in a village or area to make the trip by the technician economically viable.

 

Also, thanks to this digital tech, Nexleaf can monitor how much the stove is being used. Thus, based on actual usage, it gives money back as “climate credit”. (The cofounder and CEO, Nithya Ramanathan, cares for the environment, hence this measure).

 

~~~

 

The opposite of hot is cold. And Nexleaf uses its ColdTrace tech on the other end of the temperature spectrum. For monitoring the temperature at which vaccines are stored. In a country with problematics transportation networks, faulty refrigerators, and unstable electricity, this is very helpful. If the temperature deviates from the acceptable band, the first alert is sent to the nurse, the next one to higher authorities.

 

As the price of all Internet of Things (IoT) things kept falling and data analytics became easier, Nexleaf went further:

“ColdTrace provides health officials with an online dashboard that collects and aggregates data on refrigerator performance, power outages, temperature averages and changes over time.”

This helps health official get the big picture, spot trends, identify areas that are lagging, and also areas that are doing better, which can then be checked for best practices.

 

It is interesting how country specific solutions are evolving. By definition, most of them can only come up indigenously.