A PROJECT THAT CREATES JOBS IN AFRICA
Our manufacturing workshop
LAGAZEL’s innovation is technological and social
LAGAZEL is the first company that manufactures solar lamps in Africa on an industrial scale. The components are produced for the most part by French manufacturers, and the solar lamps are made in African workshops that are geographically close to the future beneficiaries. The first workshop was created in Burkina Faso by Arnaud Chabanne ten years ago.
The Chabanne brothers stand out in the solar electrification market, with a radically different approach to the competing products produced for the most part in Asia. The model LAGAZEL has opted for makes it possible to create local jobs in Africa, to provide local after-sales service for its clients, and to collect the products at the end of their life cycle so that they can be recycled.
The first manufacturing workshop opened its doors in October 2016 in Burkina Faso. It employs about fifteen people and has a production capacity of 100,000 to 150, 000 lamps annually.
L-BOX, The turnkey manufacturing workshop
In the context of its development, LAGAZEL has come up with an innovative concept: L-BOX, a turnkey manufacturing workshop in a simple container that makes it possible to deploy small production units anywhere in Africa.
Through the use of solar panels installed in the roof, the workshop is autonomous and can function even in areas without electricity. The LBOX workshop is part of an ecosystem of local partners (civil society entities, local institutions, companies, investors) that offers solutions that are adapted to deeply complex problems, such as the emergence of local reprocessing chains for components that are at the end of their life cycles.
Within the next 5 years, LAGAZEL hopes to have created five active regional workshops in Africa, which will correspond to about fifty people who have been trained and are employed in the manufacturing workshops. The jobs created are skilled local jobs, such as electronics welder, metals transformer, assembler, quality controller… In addition to these direct jobs, several hundred indirect jobs are created in the distribution chain, after-sales service and management of the products at the end of their life cycle. LAGAZEL thus is a significant contributor to local economic development through the transfer of technology and savoir-faire with the local manufacturing workshops and via the partnerships created with the sub-contractors and local economic partners in the manufacturing and distribution chains.
