2022 Sustainable Business Report

57 PARTNERING FOR GROWTH: TRANSFORMING LIVES | KPI SUMMARY OUR STAKEHOLDERS OUR BUSINESS OUR MATERIAL TOPICS Connecting community-led forestry projects with global markets Despite their strong climate-positive impacts, most small projects do not attempt to access global climate financing markets due to the complexity, cost and time involved. Safaricom is collaborating with 4R Digital to test a new way of overcoming the challenge. 4R Digital’s Carbon Value Exchange (CaVEx) is an innovative digital platform that enables carbon offsetting and sequestration activities from a wide range of micro-small projects in the global South to be digitised, tracked and sold in voluntary carbon markets. Using technology advances in remote sensing, device connectivity and digital payments, the platform will increase diversity of choice for carbon buyers and enable micro-small projects to be rewarded for undertaking clean activity in a digital, and highly transparent manner. To participate in CaVEx, carbon reduction/removal forestry projects must follow strict data protocols specific to their use case, approved by an external auditor. Only when protocol requirements are fulfilled, and data is flowing from remotely sensed devices into the CaVEx platform, can the project start generating carbon credits. The carbon credits created follow all relevant ISO standards (14060-series) and AI-enhanced data screening ensure validity. This data-centric approach lowers costs and includes smaller projects to the market. EXPANDING OUR USE OF CLEAN ENERGY Energy security and availability, together with the cost of energy, are critical for our platforms. In an increasingly carbon-constrained world, expanding clean energy usage is key to playing our role in mitigating climate change. We made several positive moves to enhance security and availability, reduce carbon emissions and bring down costs by: • Increasing the percentage of base stations connected to the KPLC grid, capping diesel purchases and expanding our use of solar. • Modernising our battery storage system and increasing energy efficiency by replacing over 500 lead acid storage banks with hybrid lithium solutions which charge faster and discharge over a longer period. This has enabled us to reduce diesel consumption by between 40 – 50% in the completed sites. • Increasing power resiliency in 20 data centres / MSRs and over 6 000 access sites by installing air conditioner fan boosters, reducing temperatures by as much as 5o C and deploying smart power solutions and deep battery cycling. • Piloting a radio access intelligent shutdown system based on machine learning that helps to ensure idle cells /layers are shutdown while maintaining stability and saving energy. We worked with two third-party service providers to demonstrate proof of concept, in one instance, we achieved 20% energy savings across 36 sites and savings of 16% in the other. • Automating energy reports by leveraging the Microsoft Power BI application – this level of oversight enables us to respond quickly to any outages. • Deploying data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools in two data centres to monitor, measure, manage and control energy consumption of all IT-related equipment and facility infrastructure components and give a consolidated, remote view in real-time. • Establishing Power Purchase Agreements and Independent Power Product partnerships with three different parties, two of whom we are currently onboarding. We are working with these companies to develop renewable energy for the sites, thereby enabling a move away from fossil-based fuel and grid power.