Solarcentury, SolarAid’s founding company, yesterday helped light up thousands of lives in Africa with a £98,000 donation to help fund our solar projects. The gift, worth around 20,000 solar lights, is part of Solarcentury’s ongoing pledge to give 5% of its annual profits to SolarAid. Our model is to sell solar lights to African families […]
You may recall from a previous SolarAid article that we began work on our first ever programme in Senegal last year, funded by the World Bank. Well, since the completion of our Light Libraries project back in July 2013 we have been continuing to work alongside Senegalese government partners to set-up our innovative SunnyMoney Schools programme. The programme is […]
Officials from 18 Ministries of Energy met in Benin in October to continue development of an Efficient Lighting Strategy for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Our very own Charlie Miller and Andreas Adam from Osram represented GOGLA at the event. Originally focused on the transition to efficient lighting on-grid, Charlie and Andreas worked […]
We are proud to announce Light IQ’s recent success with their “Lighting up Africa” campaign. They reached their 2013 fundraising target, which would be enough to provide funds to install solar kits in Chigawi School in the Mzuzu district, Northern Malawi. Light IQ, a leading lighting design consultancy, was the first company from the lighting […]
Well we’ve only gone and done it again… this evening our chairman, Jeremy Leggett, will be picking up our fourth award of the year! This one comes from EUROSOLAR and is a really big deal in the solar industry. The European Solar Prize awards organisations taking innovative and pioneering action in promoting widespread use of […]
SolarAid is opening a brand-new innovation hub in Kenya with support from the Turner Kirk Trust. — This year, SolarAid is launching the ‘SunnyMoney Brains’ Unit in Kenya to develop, test and implement new trading models to increase the distribution of solar lights across Africa. The innovation centre comes after a £90,000 philanthropic donation by […]
SolarAid Partnerships Manager, Charlie Miller (pictured), has published a piece on the role aid agencies should play in meeting the energy needs of off-grid communities. He believes that there are two main objectives agencies should focus on in order to foster the necessary conditions for an effective and sustainable solar market to develop. These […]
Last week we celebrated Impact Week – all the great things solar light customers have told us about how solar lights have changed their life. This week if you want to learn more about how it is we collect that research, and use it, then you’re in for a treat… Our Social Impact & Research Manager Kat […]
I’m Kat Harrison, the Social Impact & Research Manager at SolarAid. I started at SolarAid just over a year ago to set up our impact measurement and research function; if you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know all of this, of course. In just one year, we’ve made incredible progress and today marks the release […]
A charity with customers? This week is National Customer Service Week. You might wonder what National Customer Service week has to do with a charity working in Africa, but as many of you already know – we don’t believe in giving solar lights away. We sell them through our social enterprise SunnyMoney, at a full but fair […]