Hassanein, Patrick. Hassanein, to you first.
What is Axian doing in achieving its sustainability goals and how
much of a role will sustainability play in your
future?
Axian is a Pan-African player in infrastructure and services.
We're active in telecommunication, financial
services, and energy. In terms of energy transition and climate
action,
we're very much active in bringing clean energy to either
governments, B2B, and mass market.
In governments, we're providing solar parts, solar farm to the
national grids.
In B2B, we're providing CNI solutions and in mass market
we're building micro grids in Africa in small remote villages.
One thing that's very important for us at Axian is that we walk
the talk.
We're not just here to come and say, wow, here's the concept,
here are the ideas.
Let's make sure that we're acting, that we're making,
putting into action all those big nice discussion.
We need today's time to accelerate.
It's our time to make sure that we're taking the right steps to
invest in the proper technology.
We measure every year an impact index where the impact index is
making sure that all of our companies, we've got 48
companies in the group, that we're making sure that all the
companies are acting towards climate action and energy
transition.
Patrick, you spoke about their technology.
How much of a role does that have to play?
What are some of the most exciting innovations that you're
seeing at the moment?
Yeah, we believe that the climate transition will be
digital, will be green, and will have to be inclusive.
I think Axian is a good illustration of that.
They are digital by, I would say, origin.
They were a telecom company.
They moved into green and they are actually providing services
to the poorest on the continent.
This is exactly what Africa is needing: energy access to
everyone.
We see a lot of innovation on the clean energy side.
We see also a lot of innovation on the AI side.
How do you use data and AI to actually deliver climate
solutions on climate adaptation models, for example, on
agriculture and other sectors?
So yes, technology will be central to the climate
transition in Africa.
How specifically are you doing that?
How are you harnessing technology at Axian?
I'm going to take a few examples.
It's going to be very simple.
In Africa, we need energy.
Let's be honest, our customer, they're not thinking about
having it green or not green.
First of all, they need to have access to this energy.
But for me, technology is bringing the scale to accelerate
and to make sure that all and everybody, through the basis of
telecommunication or technology, is having access to all those
tools to scale faster.
An example with mobile money, we're giving access to energy to
millions of customers that can buy solar home systems because
we are scoring their credit risk, we are scoring that
ability to have this loan for getting a solar home system.
So technology for us will give us access to data, will give us
access to scale, and will give access to insight and
information about the markets.
Hassanein, Patrick, thank you so much.