For the seventh in our end-of-year series, where members of the Ashden team choose favourite moments from the year, Jo Walton, head of communications, picks her trip to India and seeing the installation of a biogas plant at SKG Sangha.
For me it was visiting India and seeing some of our winners' work in action. After five years at the Ashden Awards, to actually see this work on the ground really making a difference, was incredibly inspiring.
It was wonderful to be there when they were the building a biogas plant at SKG Sangha! But I also saw SELCO's solar home systems lighting up people's homes and TIDE's solar greenhouses providing fresh food and an income for women and children. The trip was a great privilege.
See also:
Simon picks the publication of Power to Our Neigbourhoods
Carla picks the moment AIDFI won BBC World Challenge
Jane picks the moment the finalists arrived in London
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Best Ashden Moments 2010: Jo picks seeing the installation of a biogas plant in India
Friday, 3 December 2010
Our winners broadcast globally over the weekend
This Saturday, films of our winners are being shown across the world. The Rural Energy Foundation and the partnership between the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and SNV will have their stories shared in Cancún. Their films will form part of a festival put on by the International Institute for the Environment and Development (IIED) as part of their Development and Climate Days side event. To be screened in the morning slot, they will form part of the five shorts presented under the theme 'Techonology and Adaptation: shifting towards sustainable energy production'.
On the other side of the globe in Japan, SELCO will feature in a programme analysing India's fast developing economy. To be broadcast nationally, the half-hour programme, 'Dynamic India', includes an interview with SELCO's founder Harish Hande. Harish is asked to shed light, from a social enterprise perspective, on the key to India's growth. The programme will be streamed live from NHK's website homepage and can be watched at 2:10, 6:10, 10:10, 3:10, 17:10 and 22:10 UTC (equivalent to GMT ).
(pic: Harish Hande, Founder of SELCO on 'Dynamic India' courtesy of NHK)
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
Harish says, "Look at the need, tailor the product"
"Providing bright light really impacts so many facets of people's lives. It essentially extends their day. It allows them to work for longer hours and more productively. It lets children study longer."
Harish Hande of SELCO says:
"In the traditional, top-down methodology, it's a one-sided supply chain, where the product goes down to the poor. We go from the opposite side. We look at what the need is, then tailor the product to the need."
Friday, 8 October 2010
Two Ashden winners shine in energy access report
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.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
SELCO gets the message across in New York
The SELCO event was excellent. SELCO is 15 years old now and is being hailed as an exemplary organisation for delivering clean energy to the poor. The event was hosted at the CitiBank Foundation offices and supported by the Lemelson Foundation, E+Co and the UN Foundation.
One of the people at the SELCO event was the Indian Minister, Deepak Gupta, who was at our Ashden Awards conference in India, and who is in charge of India's Ministry for New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). He remembered the Ashden Awards event and was proudly telling us that next year they will electrify 500 new villages through decentralised power and renewable energies.
Friday, 13 November 2009
The real agenda for Copenhagen is tackling poverty
Poverty is the greatest threat to our environment. The poor use some of the most inefficient technologies and polluting fuels - not because they are cheap but because they don’t have a choice.
Today’s debate on the climate change treaty is seen as between the developed world and the developing world. It has led the rich in developing countries to hide behind the poor and the poor in developing countries to be short changed. The reality is we all have a vested interested in getting this treaty right – rich and poor.
We have before us a wonderful and unique opportunity – to implement climate change solutions that will also reduce poverty, like affordable solar energy systems. My social enterprise, Selco India has provided 112,000 solar home systems to low income households and institutions. We ensure that the systems are affordable by partnering with microfinance organisations that provide small loans. We have also set up a pilot fund to guarantee the deposits on solar systems for very poor families. Nothing can compare with the thrill of someone switching on a light for the first time and knowing how this can change their life!
Much, much more of this can be done and we are showing just what's possible. If we partner with the poor to create options for them to produce their energy sustainably – be it through renewable energies or clean stoves or biogas – we will get a double whammy: a curb on climate change but also a route for them out of the relentless poverty trap.
We must put poverty at the centre stage of Copenhagen and not focus on the false confrontation between developing versus developed world. When the discussion finally turns towards providing sustainable energy solutions for the poor a new dawn of social justice and economic progress will begin.
Read more Voices on Copenhagen
Selco Solar Light designs and sells solar home systems, primarily to meet the needs of the poor. The company was winner of the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy in 2007 and a 2005 winner.
View the Ashden Awards video of SELCO:
Friday, 7 August 2009
More YouTube videos about IDEI and SELCO
Many of our Ashden Award winners also get involved with other organisations to help publicise and expand their work. Here's a couple of videos from Youtube.
IDEI, who won an Ashden Award in 2006, and an Ashden Outstanding Achievement Award in 2009, have also been working with the Skoll Foundation. Here's a video about their work:
SELCO, who won an Ashden Award in 2005, and an Ashden Outstanding Achievement Award in 2007, have been working with media organisations, such as Deutsche Welle, Germany's English-language international broadcaster, who made this film:
In case you'd never seen their original Ashden Awards films, here are the two for IDEI:
and the two for SELCO:
Thursday, 28 May 2009
India's activists push their government to put a price on carbon
Harish Hande, of Ashden Award winner SELCO, is one of a coalition of Indian entrepreneurs, activists and academics campaigning for their government to take action on climate change, as reported by the New York Times:
In two days of talks with U.S. lawmakers and policy experts in Washington, D.C., the group said Indian society is starting a serious internal discussion about its role in addressing global warming.Read the full story here
"This is about recasting the debate," said Malini Mehra, founder of the Centre for Social Markets, a nonprofit based in India and the United Kingdom that promotes entrepreneurship and sustainable growth.
"The Indian government's agenda will not change until Indians want it to change," she told a U.N. Foundation forum. "I will not rest until we have a radically different position on the Indian government's side."
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Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Powering our way out of poverty
2007 Outstanding Achievement Award winner, Harish Hande of SELCO, has written an article on the BBC News website
As the world's leaders consider how to finance our battle against climate change, the financing of practical, affordable solutions for poor people in countries like my own, India, appears to be of little interest.Read the full story here Click here to read the rest of this post.
It is nearly 130 years since Thomas Edison gave us the electric bulb, yet more than two billion people on this planet still do not have the luxury of electricity.
Up to 50% of households in India still have no access to modern lighting. Millions of street vendors, whether in the hi-tech city of Bangalore, India, or Kampala, Uganda, still resort to kerosene or candles to sell their meagre wares.
Monday, 19 January 2009
New SELCO blog
SELCO, who won Ashden Awards in 2005 and 2007 for their work in solar powered lighting, have just launched a new blog that their employees will contribute to. You can read it here:
http://selcomment.blogspot.com
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
SELCO features on Voice of America
SELCO, who won Ashden Awards in 2005 and 2007, have featured in a Voice of America article:
Group Brings Solar Power to Rural IndiaRead the full article on Voice of America, including a video clip
SELCO is a private company in Bangalore, India, that brings solar power to low income families and small businesses in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. It has twice won Ashden awards for Sustainable Energy.
Chairman of the Ashden Trust, Sarah Butler-Sloss explains, "By bringing together a package of micro-finance, of income generating training and encouragement as well as photovoltaic technology, they have found a way of showing how sustainable energy can improve the quality of life (of poor people) and they have done it in a commercial way," Butler-Sloss said.
The company's low cost solar home systems are sold to families and cooperatives that are not on the nation's power grid, bringing light and power to remote areas.
H. Harish Hande is the managing director of SELCO-INDIA says, "People come up and say 'my daughter has been able to complete her studies just because we have installed a solar light," Hande said. "We have increased our income. People even say 'my daughter was born under solar light rather than candles and kerosene."
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