RESCO

RESCO (Renewable Energy Service COmpany) started as a program from the Dutch NGO Hivos, to improve energy access in remote areas of the Indonesian Island Sumba. RESCO became an independent social enterprise in 2016. Their value proposition involves the provision of reliable, safe, affordable and clean renewable energy solutions to remote villages, business owners, residents and public facilities. Hereby, they seek to facilitate income generating activities and contribute to poverty alleviation. To this end, RESCO offers different renewable energy products for different customers: microgrids for small villages; solar home systems for residents; solar systems for schools, kiosks and small businesses. RESCO also offers solar lanterns and solar water pumps. In addition, RESCO offers installation-, operation-, and maintenance services. For these services, RESCO hires local people that receive extensive training from partner organization Hivos. Other important partners are technology providers, village governments, and the local governments and ministries that collaborate with RESCO on solar installation projects and hire RESCO for maintenance.

All in all, it can be said that RESCO’s products and services create environmental and social impact for the population of Sumba. Firstly, RESCO developed a carbon offset formula to evaluate their impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, social impact is tracked with help of Hivos, which gives advice on achieving socially oriented goals such as gender equality and women entrepreneurship. RESCO’s ultimate goal is to persuade governments to adjust the monopolistic, regulatory electricity provision framework, in order to promote private sector involvement in off-grid solutions.

You can find more information about RESCO here.

5-Step-to-scale approach

In order to effectively scale RESCO collaboratively, we organized a workshop using 5-step-to-scale framework with the participation of all RESCO partners. The outcome of the workshop is presented as below.

Step 1: Ambition

In this step, RESCO partners answered the following seven simple questions to demarcate what value they and their partners seek to create for the BoP. First, they answered the questions individually. Then they discussed each other’s answers to reach a single, shared scaling ambition. Finally, RESCO defined the following scaling impact ambition with its partners.

Step 2: Discovery

Understand the actors, resources, activities: In this step, RESCO and their partners visualized the collaborators in the ecosystem (commonly called actors), their interactions and relationships with other collaborators, and the value created, delivered and captured through the collaboration for the BoP. The ecosystem for RESCO can be visualized as below.

Understand the actors’ capabilities: RESCO partners listed out the business’s strengs, weakness, opportunities, and threat.

Step 3: Strategy

In this step, RESCO partners discovered potential scaling tactics by brainstorming ideas for each category. First, they may take a couple of minutes to think of tactics individually. Then they shared their ideas. There was no place for judgement at this stage; any idea, no matter how crazy, is listed. When everyone had shared their ideas, everyone can pick one to two most interesting ideas. This results in about three most interesting ideas for each category.

Step 4: Adaptation

In this step, RESCO partners identified and visualized the actors, resources and activities as well as the relationships between them that are necessary to realize the most interesting scaling tactics from Step 3.

Step 5: Evaluation

In this step, RESCO partners used a simple attractiveness feasibility matrix to evaluate the scaling tactics. They scored each of the most interesting scaling tactics from step 3 based on their attractiveness and feasibly on a scale from high to low.