What Support Do Energy Access Enterprises Need To Thrive?
Many enterprises are working to solve the huge problem of energy poverty in the developing world by delivering electricity to the 1.3 billion who live off the main grid, or by selling improved cook stoves to people cooking over smoky stoves or open fires that damage their health. Lots of donors, NGOs, investors and others […]
Bill Gates Can’t Build a Toilet
IN addition to eradicating polio in India and starting the personal computer revolution, the Seattle Superman of our age has managed to make going to the bathroom a cause célèbre. Five years ago, if I’d told people I worked on toilets, they would have surely assumed I was a plumber. Now, they exclaim: “Oh! Isn’t […]
Alleviating Hunger And Poverty Through Irrigation
Benson Maira, a subsistence farmer in a remote area of Zambia, had little formal schooling let alone engineering training. By tinkering with scrap metal, he created an elaborate system to bring water to his house, earning him the nickname “MacGyver” in his village after the 1980’s fictional character famed for his ability to solve complex […]
Business Solutions to Empower Smallholder Farmers
Most smallholder farmers do not grow enough food to last the year. Once their food runs out, many farm families experience what is referred to as a “hunger season” – typically a six-month period of time of meal skipping and meal substitution. This plays a major role in child deaths: one in 10 children die […]
Fighting Malnutrition With Improved Complementary Foods For Infants
As of 2014, malnutrition remains a widespread issue across the globe. Families living at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) spend an average of 60% of their income on food, and yet, undernutrition still accounts for over 3m deaths per year among infants and young children. 26% of all under-five children are stunted, irremediably reducing […]
A Tale of Tradition, Technology & Tobacco
Ethnic communities living in remote areas are not only geographically isolated, they are technologically isolated too – that’s what I thought while going to the hilly part of Bangladesh lately. And I was wrong! I was visiting Bolipara – a remote place in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of southern Bangladesh, a region famous for […]
A Tale of Tradition, Technology & Tobacco
Ethnic communities living in remote areas are not only geographically isolated, they are technologically isolated too – that’s what I thought while going to the hilly part of Bangladesh lately. And I was wrong! I was visiting Bolipara – a remote place in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of southern Bangladesh, a region famous for […]
Who Are The Innovators?
Innovation is alive and well among entrepreneurs – but not so much where you’d expect. Take Silicon Valley, for example – a place long considered virtually synonymous with innovation. Twelve companies originating from that hotbed of invention during the past decade have achieved market valuations of $1 billion or more, presumably marking them as the […]
Living Goods: Improving Health, Improving Incomes
Mary is a typical mother living in a rural Ugandan village. She has two options when one of her four children falls sick. Her first and allegedly cheapest option is walking long distances to a public facility, where she will spend hours waiting in the heat and in many cases find that free treatments are […]
Increasing Access To Energy Through Enterprise
On Saturday, 29th of March, many westerners switched off their lights to celebrate Earth Hour. The Big Ben, Times Square in New York and the Kremlin in Moscow were just a few of the iconic landmarks that joined millions of people who dimmed their lights to raise awareness about saving energy and reducing our carbon […]
How Selling Energy as a Service meets The Poor's Needs
Rather than trying to sell energy products with high up-front costs, innovative businesses are selling energy services A good starting point for a business is usually to target customers with money, and in places that are easy to reach. So it might not seem an obvious business opportunity to provide electricity to the 1.3 billion […]
How Selling Energy as a Service meets The Poor’s Needs
Rather than trying to sell energy products with high up-front costs, innovative businesses are selling energy services A good starting point for a business is usually to target customers with money, and in places that are easy to reach. So it might not seem an obvious business opportunity to provide electricity to the 1.3 billion […]
The Sun Is Shining On West Africa And Solar Microgrids
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part article on Persistent Energy Partners (PEP) and its first acquisition in Ghana. In part one, Christopher Aidun, PEP’s managing partner, discussed the strategy behind the fund (formerly E+Co) and its focus on off-grid solar technologies. In this post, we take a closer look at PEP’s first […]
Persistent Energy Partners Look To Solar Horizon
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part article on Persistent Energy Partners and its first acquisition in Ghana. In part two, we take a closer look at PEP’s first acquisition and its position in the pay-as-you-go solar sector for low-income markets. In some ways, the business model for delivering products and services to […]
KARIBU Solar Power: Making Quality Solar Affordable
From Dream to Reality Initially started by then-banker, Adam Camenzuli, and his friends from York University (Canada) in 2012 our team seeks to address one of the many issues hindering African economic development: kerosene usage. Did you know that over 500 million people across Africa have little to no access to safe sources of light […]
Making Bluetooth Work For Rural Low-Income Families
By Vincenzo Capogna, Innovation Manager, SunnyMoney SunnyMoney is a social enterprise founded by London-based charity SolarAid and we are the largest seller of pico-solar lights in Africa. A pico-solar light is a compact portable device that uses a photovoltaic panel to produce up to 10watts of power. Combined with advanced batteries and LED bulbs it […]
GravityLight: Designing for the BoP
Globally, 1.3 billion people do not have access to electricity. Millions more are ‘under-electrified’, with unreliable and sporadic supply. Instead they typically rely on kerosene for lighting. Hazardous, expensive and polluting, there is a real need to replace kerosene with a safer, sustainable and affordable light. GravityLight was born from a challenge by SolarAid to […]
Why Are So Few Inclusive Businesses Getting To Scale?
We at Monitor Inclusive Markets believe that inclusive businesses – businesses that engage the global poor as either customers or suppliers – can vastly improve the lives of millions who are suffering the consequences of global poverty. That is why we were so disappointed when in 2011 we surveyed 439 such firms in Africa and […]
An Open Letter to Larry Page
Dear Larry, In your recent conversation with Charlie Rose at TED, you said you’d rather hand over your cash to Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City) instead of donating it to a philanthropic organization. I understand the sentiment. The nonprofit sphere has generally proved itself incapable of solving many of society’s most intractable problems. In […]
Will Ending Poverty Require Endless Economic Growth?
What is Progress? If you ask this question of most Americans, they’ll probably say something that implies continuing growth in material wealth — more stuff for more people, in other words. The overwhelming majority of professional economists would agree: progress means ever-higher economic output, which in turn means increasing use of natural resources and ever-bigger […]