On my recent trip to Sidonge, it became apparent to me that there is a lot that can be said (and un-said or badly said) in a name. While talking with various village dwellers, I heard our Rural Village Energy Hub (RVE) being referred to as “the box”, the power box”, “the gas or water machine”, “the light machine” or simply as just “the machine”. Given my pedantic focus on always using “rural village energy hub”, I was a little frustrated. It dawned on me that we needed something cleaner and simpler.

Artistic impression: Kudura

This got me thinking about branding – as most of our rural marketing effort is vested in word-of-mouth marketing, it became apparent to me that it is pretty critical to us to ensure that our “marketers”, the people who benefit from the service directly speak with one tongue so to speak. We clearly need the population to be positively referring to our solution with the same name when they speak with friends and family – preferably something local, memorable and relevant.

We reviewed a number of Kiswahili words with Lulu and Kudura being the group favorites:

• ‘Tunu’ — something valuable, precious, treasure, something rare, souvenir
• ‘Lulu’ — pearl — like Uganda known as ‘The Pearl of Africa’
• ‘Safina’ — Noah’s Ark –as in life-saving, delivering
• ‘Kudura’ — power, mighty or godly power  –as in power to change!
• ‘Johari’ — jewel

We finally settled on KUDURA for a number of reasons – for me personally the concept of “power to change” resonated closely with our tagline of “changing rural life forever” – so there it is, RVE is now known as KUDURA!

The latest news from Mombassa is that we expect to get our shipment cleared out of customs this week, with installations being finalised by the end of October. Please check back here for photos and video as soon as we do!