#solaraid

[sunrisekat]

A Cleaner Path: solar energy’s impact on health

Imagine for a moment that the light used in your home was a poison. One that could damage your lungs, irritate your eyes, even impact the health of your unborn child. You’d think twice about flicking on that switch. Kerosene lamps—used by an estimated 290 million people across Africa—contribute to household air pollution. Such pollution is responsible for more deaths a year than tuberculosis, malaria and HIV combined.

Fortunately there is a solution that promises to make a big impact on improving household air quality. Solar products such as lanterns and rooftop systems offer a pollution-free, cost-effective alternative for lighting homes through the night. They can replace dimmer, older, dirtier forms of lighting, such as kerosene, which expose users to potentially severe health risks from smoke and soot. Solar is becoming increasingly popular in developing countries, led by the success of Acumen investees such as d.light, SolarNow and Devergy amongst others.

Despite decades of kerosene fuel usage, it is only relatively recently that there has been a recognition that smoke from kerosene lamps and cookstoves might present a serious health risk. Studies have associated kerosene use in homes with tuberculosis, and poor neonatal and maternal health. As a result the fuel is strongly discouraged by the World Health Organization (WHO) for household use.

While we know solar holds incredible potential for the poor, there is little research on how switching from kerosene to solar impacts a family’s health. In partnership with SolarAid and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and with funding from Google, we set about addressing this gap in knowledge. Our study in Busia County, Kenya, was focused on quantifying changes in exposure to fine particulate matter (PM), a common air pollutant, and carbon monoxide (CO) following a switch from kerosene to solar.

The study used a range of methods to measure exposure. These included traditional survey-based data collection but also a range of sensors that gathered precise information on pollution levels. Devices were fitted to kerosene and solar lamps to monitor duration of usage. Temperature changes were used to record the use of kerosene lamps. Solar lamp use was tracked by a sensor connected to the on/off switch. Instruments were fitted across the house to measure household concentrations of both PM and CO. And to measure personal exposure to PM and CO, two participants—typically the mother and a school pupil—wore vests containing light-weight monitors for 48 hours.

Here’s what we learned:

Kerosene users believe the fuel affects their health. More than nine out of ten of all household members said that kerosene lamps affected their breathing. A quarter of adults reported wheezing and three fifths of the children reported waking up at night to cough. Every child we spoke to complained that smoke in their eyes made it harder for them to read.

People prefer solar to kerosene. Our study gave three solar lamps to kerosene-using households. One month later, sensor-based measurements indicated that all houses had reduced their use of kerosene lamp by at least 90 percent, indicating a clear preference for solar above kerosene. Measurements also showed that this transition was rapid, occurring within days of receiving the solar lamps.

Solar users experienced a meaningful reduction in exposure to household air pollution. Prior to the introduction of solar lanterns, kerosene use was associated with substantial exposure to PM in both adults and schoolchildren. Reduction in exposure following the distribution of solar lamps averaged 73 percent among schoolchildren and 50 percent among adults. This finding is encouraging. This was a relatively short study, but if solar lamps continue to be used in place of kerosene lamps, it is likely that there would be health benefits as a consequence of the reduction in air pollution.

Achieving a “safe” level of exposure to pollution would require reducing use of other dangerous fuels. Unfortunately, kerosene is not the only potentially dangerous fuel the poor use on a daily basis. Our study found that, according to WHO standards, adults who made the switch to solar were still exposed to an unsafe level of pollution in their homes. This was in large part due to the use of “traditional” cooking stoves—open fires, typically burning wood or charcoal—which are also a major contributor to household air pollution. Therefore to achieve acceptably low levels of exposure for everyone in the family, it will be necessary to reduce other sources of pollution alongside kerosene.

To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to look specifically at the dangers of kerosene. By comparison, the negative impact of cooking indoors with firewood and charcoal has been studied extensively. This research is an important first step towards understanding how kerosene affects the health of low-income families. We believe that these lessons are vital for governments, businesses, and members of households responsible for making decisions that will impact the health and well-being of their families. If we want to reduce the scourge of household air pollution, it is essential to eradicate the use of kerosene. To that end, solar energy is our best bet.

If you would like to learn more about our research, you can find a summary report here, and the full academic paper here.

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This is the second installment of a series of lessons from a range of new research into the social impact of off-grid energy in emerging markets. The research is complemented by Acumen’s own customer-based data collection applying our Lean Data approach. This work was originally conceived by Kat Harrison, formerly head of research and impact at SolarAid and now Acumen’s Associate Director of Impact.

Reposted from Acumen’s Energy Impact Series

[sunrisekat]

Lighting the Way: solar energy’s impact on poverty

In the last decade, solar lanterns have emerged as a clean, cost-effective solution to provide access to modern energy to the 1.2 billion people currently living off-grid. These small, portable and rechargeable lights fulfill an immediate need for the poor and, as a result, have become increasingly widespread in countries across Africa, South Asia and beyond. They are affordable, easy to use and require little maintenance. And for families who’ve become accustomed to life stopping when the sun sets, a solar lantern can mean hours of light to enjoy dinner together, do homework for class tomorrow, or keep a business open a little later.

While it’s clear at a basic level that access to energy has the potential to transform a family’s standard of living — from cutting monthly costs to contributing to the improved health of a household — there is little academic evidence connecting solar lights to poverty alleviation. With solar energy quickly becoming a smart, cheap and cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, we want to understand its impact on the lives of the poor. With funding from Google, and in partnership with SolarAid and ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, we set out three years ago to learn more about solar energy’s impact on the alleviation of income poverty.

The research worked with more than 1000 low-income households in rural Kenya to learn more how they valued small-scale solar products. In Africa,nearly 70 percent of households do not have access to electricity and, in rural Kenya alone, roughly 93 percent of the population lives without electricity. The study set out to understand how these households used solar products, how much they save and the impact they had in their day-to-day lives.

Here’s what we learned:

Solar lanterns save cash. As part of the research, low-income customers were offered a variety of solar lanterns at market price, subsidized prices, or free of charge, enabling families to replace kerosene lamps with a clean solar light. As a result, households reduced their monthly expenditure on energy by roughly half, freeing between one to two percent of total household expenditure.

Price matters. As anticipated, the demand for solar lanterns was heavily connected to the price offered. Close to 69 percent of households jumped at the opportunity to purchase a light at a discounted rate of $4 while only 29 percent made the purchase at the market price of $9. But 100 percent took the opportunity to use a solar light when offered free. Of course, it’s no surprise that demand rises with a lower price, but this is the first evidence of the extent of price-sensitivity of low income consumers.

Poorer households spend a larger share of their total expenditure on energy. The findings show that the poorest households spend a relatively large proportion of their income on energy (the poorest quintile spent around 10 percent of their total expenditure in energy). But as families become wealthier, energy expenditure falls as a proportion of total expenditure (the average across all households was around 5 percent of their total expenditure).

Everyone loves (and uses) a solar lantern. They’re easy to use and, whether households were given a lantern free of charge or paid for them, their usage and behavior didn’t change. This suggests that users derive value from the lights regardless of how they obtain them. It could mean that there is a role for subsidy in reaching the very poorest with lighting.

These lessons are helping prove that solar lanterns play a small but significant role in improving the economic welfare of the poor. By fulfilling an immediate need, solar lights are the fastest and least expensive way for low-income families to access modern energy and move up the energy ladder. They also provide valuable insight to companies, governments and nonprofits about the price sensitivity of different types of consumers, in order to support market development, vital in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal of universal energy access by 2030.

If you’d like to read more about the results of the research, there is a summary report here and the full academic working paper here.

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This is the first installment of a series of lessons from a range of new research into the social impact of off-grid energy in emerging markets. The research is complemented by Acumen’s own customer-based data collection applying our Lean Data approach. This work was originally conceived by Kat Harrison, formerly head of research and impact at SolarAid and now Acumen’s Associate Director of Impact.

Reposted from Acumen’s Energy Impact Series

[sunrisekat]

The Energy Impact Series

We live in a world that is piloting driverless cars and commercial space flight yet, when the sun goes down across the globe, one in six people live more or less in darkness.

For these 1.2 billion mostly poor, mostly rural people, a lack of reliable, affordable energy has an overwhelmingly negative impact on their lives. It harms their prospects of working their way out of poverty, forces them into the paradox of spending up to one hundred times more than you or I on inferior energy products such as kerosene lamps, and exposes them to life-threatening indoor pollutants. Traditional fossil fuel alternatives also emit high volumes of the world’s top two contributors to climate warming: carbon dioxide and black carbon.

At Acumen, we’ve been obsessed with what it means to live off grid since we started investing in energy in 2007. In the last decade, we’ve made more than 20 investments in companies providing solutions from biomass-powered mini-grids to pay-as-you-go solar home systems. We’ve learned that not only is there a significant — and growing — demand for off-grid energy but there is also a number of fantastic enterprises emerging to meet this need. These are exciting times as we’re reaching a tipping point that makes achieving energy access for all seem closer than ever.

But while we’ve long known that the social benefits of renewable energy are intuitive, there has been a surprising lack of quality evidence, even as the sector matures, about how, why, and to what degree access to energy is actually improving people’s lives. For example we’ve known little about families’ spending on energy and what shapes their decisions as well as the impact improved energy access has on household finances, health, opportunities for education, income generation, and movement up the energy ladder.

This lack of evidence has had some very real implications. For example, it has hindered our ability to understand the benefits of greater investment in the sector and led, in some instances, to skepticism concerning the social returns in comparison to more established forms of poverty alleviation such as investment in health, education, or clean water.

Moreover, achieving such an ambitious goal as energy for all — a target of the new UN Sustainable Development Goals — requires considerable collaboration across government, social and private sectors. A lack of evidence has hampered our cross-cutting discussions with governments, restricting policy dialogue and the ability to develop products and services that best meet the needs of off-grid populations.

To help fill this gap in knowledge, we are kicking off a series featuring new, breakthrough research that seeks to answer questions at the cutting edge of impact and off-grid energy. It is the culmination of years of work conceived and initiated by Kat Harrison, who previously worked at SolarAidand now leads Acumen’s work on the impact of our energy investments. Together these findings form the sector’s most extensive collection of academic research, complemented by Acumen’s own customer-based data on our energy portfolio using our Lean Data approach, which we will share this summer.

Through this series, we’ll share insights and hard evidence on the links between solar energy and poverty, health and education along with an assessment of the energy ladder as it exists today. This work has been executed in partnership with research powerhouses ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley,Stanford, United Nations Capital Development Fund, JPAL and more.

We hope you find this research as illuminating as we do and welcome your feedback to help guide our future work. This is a big step forward in unpacking the impact of off-grid energy, but it is by no means the end of what there is learn about the life-changing effects of access to energy.

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Written by Tom Adams, reposted from Acumen’s Energy Impact Series

[sunrisekat]

Baseline results from education study

You might have heard about the research study on the impact of solar lighting on educational outcomes in Zambia that was dreamed up at SolarAid in 2014. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) and Stanford University are co-funding this study and I’m managing it here at Acumen (more on the move of the SolarAid research and impact work to Acumen here). d.light have kindly donated S2 solar lights for the study.

The research will focus on tracking the academic performance, school attendance and secondary school advancement of primary school students, and will also devote significant efforts to uncovering changes in study patterns, use of "free" time, and the potentially complicated interplay between energy access, poverty, gender, and education. 

The baseline research has been completed, a lottery of prizes including d.light S2 solar lights, were randomly given to students, and the next stage of the research is to revisit schools and conduct follow up research to identify any changes. Results will be shared in April 2017.

You can find a summary report on the GOGLA resources page here, and here are some interesting findings from the baseline research:

29% of students said they missed school because their school fees were not paid.

Male students were most likely to do their homework immediately after school, whereas female students were most likely to do it very late at night. 

67% of students reported that they work on most days to earn money and 34% of these do so to earn money to pay for school. 

83% of households used torches (flashlights) for lighting. 

Follow me on Twitter to keep updated on results.

[sunrisekat]

SolarAid research move to Acumen

Big news, Acumen, the global social impact organisation, has announced the rehoming of our award-winning Research and Impact department at SolarAid. With the move, Acumen builds on its decade of investing in off-grid energy, further deepening its understanding of the energy needs of low-income populations while measuring the social impact of newly electrified individuals and households. Acumen began investing in off-grid energy solutions in 2007 and today has the largest portfolio of companies committed to serving the poor.

This acquisition provides Acumen with access to SolarAid’s extensive databases and research networks in East Africa, and brings me onto Acumen’s staff. I will be building on all the work as Acumen’s new Associate Director of Impact.

“There is much we still don’t know about the impact of off-grid energy solutions on the lives of the poor,” said Acumen’s Chief Innovation Officer Sasha Dichter. “Even within Acumen’s energy portfolio, it is a challenge to gather robust data on how poor customers are using off-grid energy products, and the long-term impact our energy companies are having in alleviating poverty. With Kat and SolarAid’s research now powering our work, we can start to truly understand how energy is transforming the lives of the poor.”

I’ll continue to lead a number of research projects initiated at SolarAid and supported by major funders. These projects include the first large-scale study on the impact of solar lights on poverty reduction, supported byGoogle, and an investigation on the impact of solar lighting on education outcomes in partnership with Stanford University, supported by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

The arrangement with SolarAid comes on the heels of a major year in Acumen’s investing history, in which it added nine new social enterprises to its clean energy portfolio. Acumen’s investing in these companies is to drive innovation to find faster, more efficient solutions that provide the poor with new opportunities and the promise of a brighter future. While providing access to energy to the poor has been a core component of Acumen’s approach to tackling poverty, its vision is to create an off-grid solar ecosystem that fills in the missing gaps in the value chain and accelerates energy access across the developing world. Since 2007, Acumen has invested more than $17 million in 15 off-grid renewable energy companies working across India, Pakistan and East Africa.

“We’re obviously sad to be saying goodbye to Kat but we’re delighted to have found a new home for our award-winning Research and Impact department,” said SolarAid’s UK Operations Director, Richard Turner. “Acumen shares many of the same values and goals that we hold—including an unwavering commitment to catalyzing solar markets for the poor—and we are confident that Kat’s research will go from strength to strength, taking what we have built to the next level. And most importantly, improving energy access in some of the poorest regions of the world.”

You can learn more about Acumen’s energy portfolio here, and continue to follow me on Twitter for updates and more news!

[sunrisekat]

A new home for SolarAid research: coming soon

It’s been another landmark year for SunnyMoney, with record sales and some huge milestones achieved. But there have been big challenges too with floods in Malawi, teacher strikes in Kenya and a surge in fake lights in Tanzania.

Financial challenges have meant that SolarAid and SunnyMoney have had to quickly adapt to ensure we can continue to help build markets right across Africa.

So, SolarAid have made the decision to focus more on our core on-the-ground operations which means, I am sad to say, our Research & Impact team will no longer be based at SolarAid. Much of the wonderful research team in Africa and I are saying our farewells, but we want to make sure all our work can continue to support the sector and are looking forward to sharing where we land in a month or two.

You can read a bit more about this on the SolarAid website here and follow me on Twitter for updates.

[sunrisekat]

Ray of Sunshine: my favourites

You may have already heard that SolarAid are having to make some hard decisions and are restructuring and refocusing. This means that the Research & Impact department is being discontinued at SolarAid. We hope to share some positive news on the future, next week, but for now, here’s a collection of my favourite things SunnyMoney solar light users in Africa have told the research team over the last three years since we set up the research function: 

“We live a happy life now when darkness comes because we are able to light our home for a long time [with our solar light].” Sithembile Kasambala, Karonga, Malawi

“[Since the solar light] my lifestyle has changed, my kids eat well, study well and we are a happy family now.” Dickson Murumbi in Kenya

“A lot of things have changed [thanks to the solar light]; the house is brighter and the children are happy.” Weakness Mwenelupembe in Malawi

“[The solar light] helps my children to study more – that will make them have development in the future.” Christina Fenansi, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

“As a family, [the solar light] helps us to share experiences of the day.” Frank Asiye in Malawi

“Kerosene was expensive for me so I did not allow [my daughter] to study at night but now she is free to study any time [with the solar light].” Honoratha Elipidi in Tanzania

“As a family [the solar light] helps us to come together at night,” Johnson Mwalukuwa in Malawi

“Now, even the time that I travel I am not worrying about the safety of the house or my children in darkness.” Gulinja Gulinja, Tanzania

"I will spend [the savings] on Christmas; going to buy meat and clothing for my children." Robert Mutaki, Uganda

"The solar light is brighter than candlelight or kerosene lanterns. [With the savings] I buy books for my children." Josephine Sialubinda, Zambia

[sunrisekat]

Ray of Sunshine: meeting more energy needs

You may have heard that the UNCDF is commissioning a study on the energy ladder in Uganda, in partnership with us at SolarAid, and some other great names (GSMA, GOGLA). 

Well, we wanted to find out through our own research a few things related to this. From interviews with over 1,750 SunnyMoney solar light customers, our research teams in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia have found that 75% of customers with an entry-level solar light (that’s the small, portable ones with one light) who were followed up with 6-9 months after purchase, said they were interested to buy a light with more capacity. And of these customers interested to buy a light which can meet more of their energy needs, 50% said they felt more able to do so since buying the SunnyMoney solar light.

24% of the respondents said they’d like to expand their system to have more lights, 21% would like to charge phones, 19% mentioned wanting brighter lights, and another 19% said they’d like to charge their radio.

For 86% of those interviewed, it was their first solar product, and for 58% they didn’t know where they could buy another solar light…..so it looks like there is still lots to do to make sure that people living off-grid can be reached with safe, affordable energy.