Two Ashden winners shine in energy access report

The Fondacion Ensemble is a French foundation that brings together human development and environmental protection. Its latest newsletter (pdf here) reports on the annual lunch for the Foundation's College of Experts, where the theme of the lunch was "innovative social entrepreneurship".

One of the speakers, Olivier Kayser, is managing director of Hystra Consultancy. His company has worked with Ashoka to produce a 100-page report, Access to Energy for the Base of the Pyramid (pdf here).

The report studied 150 projects in terms of their "economic viability" and "project scalability". When it came to the lunchtime talk, Kayser decided to single out two projects for praise.

The key discovery of these projects is to have started out from a base of what the beneficiary populations can manage to pay for them and to have already researched what can be done to improve them.

The two projects were SELCO and Grameen Shakti.

Both, of course, are Ashden Award winners.