Jesse Moore is an American social entrepreneur who co-founded M-KOPA Solar, the company that pioneered pay-as-you-go solar energy in Kenya and demonstrated that M-Pesa's mobile money infrastructure could be used to finance asset ownership for millions of off-grid households. Under Moore's leadership as CEO, M-KOPA grew into one of the largest off-grid energy companies in the world, connecting over three million homes to solar power and raising more than $190 million in equity and debt financing.
Moore's path to founding M-KOPA began with a career in the intersection of technology and international development. He worked at the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) and later at the Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte), where he focused on market-based approaches to poverty alleviation. This background gave him a framework for thinking about energy access not as a charity problem but as a market opportunity - one where the challenge was not building solar technology (which was already cheap and reliable) but designing financing mechanisms that made it affordable for households earning less than $5 per day.
The critical connection was Nick Hughes, a Vodafone executive who had been instrumental in the creation of M-Pesa. Hughes understood mobile money infrastructure at a level few others did, and he saw that M-Pesa could be extended beyond person-to-person transfers to enable entirely new business models. Moore and Hughes, joined by Chad Larson, founded M-KOPA in 2012 with a deceptively simple insight: if a Kenyan household could afford KSh 50 per day for kerosene (the primary lighting fuel for off-grid homes), they could afford KSh 50 per day for solar - if the upfront cost of a solar system could be spread across daily micro-payments collected via M-Pesa.
The technology stack that enabled this was innovative. M-KOPA's solar home systems contained embedded GSM modules and IoT controllers that communicated with a central server. When a customer made a daily M-Pesa payment, the server sent an unlock code to the device. If payment lapsed, the device locked. This remote lock/unlock capability - essentially a technology-enabled credit enforcement mechanism - meant M-KOPA could extend credit to customers with no collateral, no bank account, and no credit history. The device itself was the collateral, and the payment behaviour was the credit score.
Moore built M-KOPA into a company that attracted some of the most respected impact investors in the world. Generation Investment Management (Al Gore's fund), the International Finance Corporation, and several other development-focused investors backed the company. M-KOPA expanded from solar systems to smartphones, televisions, and other assets - all financed through the same pay-as-you-go mechanism. The company began operating in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Ghana, building on the Kenyan model.
The broader significance of Moore's work at M-KOPA was in proving that mobile money infrastructure could be the foundation for asset financing in emerging markets - that M-Pesa was not just a payment system but a platform for financial services that could reach populations formal banking had excluded. This insight influenced an entire generation of embedded fintech companies across Silicon Savannah and beyond.
See Also
Sources
- Bright, Jake. "M-KOPA Solar Reaches 1 Million Connected Homes in East Africa." TechCrunch, 2019.
- Adegoke, Yinka. "How M-KOPA Built a Pay-as-You-Go Solar Empire on M-Pesa Rails." Rest of World, 2021.
- Moore, Jesse. "Pay-as-You-Go Solar: Lessons from M-KOPA." Presentation at Stanford Social Innovation Review Conference, 2018.
- Lighting Global / IFC. "Off-Grid Solar Market Trends: The Role of Mobile Money in Asset Financing." World Bank Report, 2020.