Economic Empowerment
In Uganda, micro, small, and medium enterprises who purchased off-grid refrigerators, on average, increased their daily incomes 2.5-fold.
Appliances for Economic Empowerment
Appliances play a critical role in economic empowerment in off- and weak-grid communities. Solar products can increase productivity by providing more hours of light and offering a reliable electricity connection for small businesses in all stages of the production process. Raising the productivity of existing work in, for example, the agriculture sector helps raise incomes among the rural poor, while new appliances can also create value chains and generate employment opportunities.
As the off-grid solar market expands, more products are being used in income-generating applications. These range from the use of small solar systems in households for mobile phone charging, to lighting, sound, and television in bars and restaurants, refrigeration and cooling, to solar water pumps for irrigation, agri-processing, and various industries such as carpentry, tailoring, welding and looming. Off-grid appliances drive income increases through improved productivity and support job creation and economic diversification. A recent study found that 58% of households undertake more economic activity due to their purchase of a solar home system (SHS), either by unlocking additional work hours, using the system in a new or existing business, or enabling SHS-owners to get a new job.
Off-Grid appliances enable income generation and poverty alleviation
Solar Water Pumps
Solar pumping systems can result in significant long-term cost savings and increased agricultural productivity to farmers.
Bangladesh has set a target to deploy 50,000 solar pumps by 2025.
Consumer Spotlight
Tirus Mwangi, a spinach farmer from Kenya, made the decision to buy a solar water pump because he was struggling to pump manually from his nearby borehole. Now, Tirus pumps about 2,100 litres of water each week on average. He uses the water to irrigate his spinach, provide drinking water for his 13 cows, pump water for domestic use. Titus’ solar water pump is now the only source of water for his 3 acre farm.
Since purchasing the solar water pump, Tirus has seen an increase in his productivity and income. He also said that the pump has improved his quality of life very much.
Learn more about the economic benefits of solar water pumps.
Off-Grid Refrigerators
Refrigeration enables income-generation for small retailers and other value chain actors through the storage of cold drinks, food, and other perishable items for later sale.
Refrigerator customers surveyed in Kenya and Uganda reported average gross sales increases of $20-28 per week.
Consumer Spotlight
Thipperudrappa is a road-side food truck entrepreneur who sells drinks and snacks at a toll plaza on India’s National Highway 4. Thipperudrappa installed a 100L solar refrigerator/freezer on his truck in order to sell cold food and beverages, and reduce financial losses from food spoilage.
Thipperudrappa’s mother described milk spoilage as the primary motive to purchase the new refrigerator. “Milk spoils very quickly in the summer, and once it goes, we cannot sell it.” The solar refrigerator helps extend the product shelf-life of milk and other beverages, which in turn improves earning potential. Thipperudrappa’s income has increased since purchasing his DC refrigerator/freezer. On average, he sells 25 liters of beverage per day. The solar panels installed on his food truck serves as a free advertisement — people come to the truck and ask for cold drinks when they see the solar panels.
Because the solar water pump has no other expenses, I irrigate my farm freely. This has caused my farm productivity to change. Now, I get more crops due to irrigation and I also get enough food for my household.Malinda Changwe
Maize and watermelon farmer, Tanzania
Health
Appliances on the Frontlines of COVID-19 Response
As vulnerable off-grid communities face the health and socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19, appliances are at the frontlines of a global response. Around the world, families rely on their appliances to access critical public health information and shelter safely at home. An effective vaccine campaign is predicated on medical supply chains and clinics having access to electricity and refrigeration. CLASP, through the Efficiency for Access Coalition, works to ensure off-grid communities are not left behind by advocating for access to reliable energy and quality appliances.
A super-efficient, off-grid appropriate vaccine refrigerator requires just 10% of the solar panel and battery capacity as a conventional vaccine refrigerator.
Health and Energy Efficiency
Tens of thousands of healthcare facilities in low- and middle-income countries lack access to electricity. Without electricity, clinics cannot utilize some of the most basic tools required to provide modern medical care. Solar power offers health care facilities a reliable energy alternative, however, many systems in use are oversized, expensive, and power inefficient, poor-quality devices. Durable, energy-efficient appliances allow clinics to deliver quality healthcare services while using significantly less energy and lowering costs by reducing the energy system sizes.
An energy-efficient refrigerator requires just 10% of the solar panel and battery capacity as a conventional vaccine refrigerator. Analysis from CLASP and the Clinton Health Access Initiative found that the size of the energy system required to power an inefficient vaccine refrigerator could power a far more expansive load when a super-efficient refrigerator is used alongside a suite of other super-efficient appliances and medical devices, including a pulse oximeter, autoclave/sterilizer, fetal heart monitor, four fans, ten lights, a radio, and 5 other devices.
Through the Efficiency for Access Coalition, CLASP is advocating for a suite of research and programmatic activities that expand and solidify linkages between energy access and health outcomes. This includes assessing the potential benefits of super-efficient appliances and devices for health service delivery in resource-constrained areas and identifying specific interventions with the potential to drive impacts at scale.
Improving Public Health Through High-Quality Appliances
Refrigerators
Refrigeration is essential to maintaining the efficacy of vaccinations and extending the supply of perishable foods.
50% of vaccines are wasted globally every year, largely due to lack a of temperature control.
Improving Public Health Through Energy-Efficient Refrigerators
Millions of children remain unvaccinated against preventable diseases, largely due to a lack of access to cooling infrastructure. The World Health Organization estimates that 50% of vaccines are wasted globally every year; largely due to a lack of temperature control and the logistics to support an unbroken cold-chain. Expanding access to energy-efficient vaccine refrigerators would enable clinics with no or unreliable energy access to safely store life-saving vaccines.
Refrigerator ownership can also refrigerators promote diversified diets linked to healthier immune systems. A household study in Nairobi, Kenya found that refrigerators owners were 30% more likely to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.
Fans
Fans provide life-saving relief from heatwaves and improve indoor air quality through improved ventilation.
In a survey of 1,600 off-grid fan customers in Bangladesh, 92% believed their fan had a positive impact on their family's health.
Providing life-saving relief from extreme heat and indoor air pollution
Hot and humid environments increase the risk of serious health conditions, such as heatstroke and temperature-related heart problems. Fans provide relief from extreme heat by removing warm air and replacing it with drier air that helps to reduce one’s body temperature.
Fans can also help improve indoor air quality by reducing pollution and the presence of mold-related allergens through improved ventilation. Biomass cooking and kerosene lamps create unhealthy indoor environments. By moving air around, fans could help lower the number of premature deaths attributed to indoor air pollution.
Security and Comfort in a Warming World
Fans can reduce mortality and morbidity during severe heat waves by preventing elevations in heart rate and core temperature driven by high temperatures. Read our latest blog post to learn how Fozle Rabbi, a solar customer, is using his fan to keep cool when the power grid goes out.
Women & Gender
Women in sub-Saharan Africa spend as many as five hours per day collecting fuel for cooking.
Energy access and gender equality are inextricably linked
Expanding energy access has the potential to transform lives at household and business levels. And yet, distribution of energy access remains uneven, with more than 95% of the 900 million people without access to electricity located in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Due to cultural conventions and social norms, women shoulder a disproportionate share of the energy poverty burden. Women are tasked with time and labor-intensive activities like firewood gathering, water collection, and manual grain processing, often at the expense of education or other productive activities. Women also have fewer opportunities than men to own mobile phones, gain access to capital or even have a voice in household decision-making on energy matters. As a result, women and girls are being impacted in far greater numbers than men by energy poverty, financial poverty, and adverse climate change impacts.
Clean and affordable energy-efficient appliances have the opportunity to empower women and achieve a union of Sustainable Development Goals 5 (gender equality) and 7 (universal access to energy). Solar-powered, super-efficient appliances promise to alleviate drudgery, improve health and increase available time for education and economic empowerment—ultimately contributing to the shifting of gender roles and relations. If income-generating and time-saving appliances such as refrigerators, solar water pumps, or sewing machines can be accessed equally, women will experience profound improvements on their health, well-being, and social and economic status. Empowering women through equal access to energy and decision-making can also have a significant impact on their community’s overall security and resilience.
Expanding Access to Off-Grid Technologies to Advance Gender Equality
Solar Water Pumps
With a broad range of benefits, solar water pumps are crucial in the push for gender equality. Solar water pumps can reduce drudgery and time spent collecting water, provide opportunities for income generation, increase productivity of farms and households and improve hygiene and sanitation.
In sub-Saharan Africa, one roundtrip to collect water is 33 minutes on average in rural areas.
Consumer Spotlight
Before purchasing her first solar water pump, Jacinta Kirigo, a farmer from central Kenya, spent 3-4 hours a day manually irrigating her crops. Now, with steady irrigation from her solar pump, Jacinta is able to sustain more water intensive crops and increase crop yields.
Off-Grid Refrigerators
By keeping perishable produce at cool temperatures, refrigerators not only reduce food wastage and money loss, but unlock time for women that they would otherwise spend collecting fuel, traveling to food markets or cooking.
Only 17% of households in sub-Saharan Africa and 30% in India own a refrigerator.
Consumer Spotlight
Namugga Proscovia, an entrepreneur living in eastern Uganda, invested in a SolarNow 112-liter refrigerator that has allowed her to provide her community with cool, clean drinking water. Before, the nearest refrigerators were located six kilometers away on the main village road. “At the road, the water was not boiled,” she explains. “We had been falling sick of typhoid fever. I am now able to provide water that is clean. Ever since we started boiling the water, we can confidently trust that it’s safe.” Selling the water has enabled her to generate an additional income of 70,000 shillings ($19) per week, offsetting the costs from the fridge.
Fans
As a relatively low-cost appliance, fans can help increase productivity and help those at most risk adapt to climate change. Because the household is a predominantly female sphere in many countries, women are more acutely impacted by these benefits.
Over 260 million fans were sold worldwide in 2016.
Consumer spotlight
Parvin Akther, a stay-at-home mother in Bangladesh, purchased an off-grid fan made more affordable through Global LEAP Awards financing. During monsoon season, when the temperature averages 31°C (87.8°F), Pravin and her family rely on their off-grid fan for cooling and comfort.
Televisions
While our research indicates that the typical solar TV customer is male, as an in-home appliance, solar TVs directly influence women’s empowerment and are associated with positive changes in school enrolment, literacy, family planning, financial decisions and health.
Solar TVs can help reduce gender-based violence by exposing women and girls to news and global views that are intolerant of gender-based violence.
Consumer spotlight
Teresa Lekuraki, a mother of four in western Kenya, purchased a home solar package from Mobisol that included a 32” flat screen TV financed through the Global LEAP Awards. Safety concerns for her children may not have motivated her purchase, but an increased sense of safety is one of the benefits. Her family lives on a floodplain traversed by a river that swells several times a year. The TV helps to keep her children safely inside and entertained during periods of flooding. “Plus, they learn things like spelling and math from educational programming, and the whole family sits down to watch the news together every night.”
Electric Pressure Cookers
Every day, millions of women breath in harmful smoke while cooking and spend hours walking far distances to secure cooking fuel. As an appliance more closely associated with prescribed gender norms, EPCs directly target women’s well-being. In addition to shortening the duration of cooking and unlocking time for other productive activities, EPCs can eliminate risk of illness from household air pollution.
40% of the world’s population uses inefficient and polluting fuels such as wood, charcoal, coal and kerosene for cooking.
Explore the following resources to learn more
Accelerating Micro-Grid E-Cooking through Business and Delivery Model Innovations
Electric Cooking Impacts: Electric Pressure Cookers Enhance Community Resiliency
Women at the Forefront of Solar
From refrigerators to fans, appliances are transforming women’s roles and capacities within their homes and communities. Explore this impact story to learn how off-grid appliances are facilitating and expanding gender-positive productive uses of energy.
Agriculture
Agriculture is the world’s single largest employer, sustaining the livelihoods of 40% of the global population.
Increasing agricultural productivity enhances food and income security
65% of farms in sub-Saharan Africa rely on human power. Modern, solar-powered agricultural technologies enable farmers to maximize the utility of their land while reducing the time and effort needed to do so.
Improving agricultural productivity has a direct impact on poverty alleviation: a 10% increase smallhold farm productivity in Africa leads to a 7% reduction in poverty. Expanding access to durable and affordable irrigation systems, cold storage, and processing equipment, allows farmers to improve their yields and livelihoods while increasing community resilience.
Scaling High-Impact Agricultural Technologies
Solar Water Pumps
Situated at the heart of the water-food-energy nexus, solar water pumps play a critical role in improving the incomes and resilience of rural households while unlocking environmental benefits.
95% of farmed land in sub-Saharan Africa and 60% of land in South Asia rely solely on rainfall for irrigation.
In pursuit of a more efficient, affordable, and consumer-focused solar water pump
Over 500 million farming households worldwide could benefit significantly from adopting modern irrigation technology. By expanding seasonal growing cycles and mitigating periods of low or irregular rainfall, solar water pumps can increase farmer yields by as much as three-fold, providing households with more disposable income to pay for expenses and save for emergencies that reduce their overall vulnerability to risks.
Despite their potential, the market for solar water pumps has yet to achieve scale. CLASP has partnered with leaders in the clean energy access sector to analyze and share essential technology performance data and qualitative consumer feedback collected through field testing and surveys.
These efforts, coupled with consumer-education and awareness campaigns, are unearthing new intelligence on the real-world performance solar water pumps that enable manufacturers to design and market a more durable, affordable and customer-friendly solar water pump.
Learn more about the use and benefits of solar water pumps.
Photo credits: SunCulture and FuturePump
Agriculture Cold Chains
Modern cold chain technology is crucial to developing local and international agriculture-based markets and improving economic outcomes and food security.
Establishing cold chains as extensive and reliable as those in industrialized countries would raise food supply by 15% in developing countries.
Harnessing the power of solar
Agricultural cold chains advance global food security and improve smallholder farmers’ livelihoods by reducing post-harvest loss of high-value crops, increasing profits through greater bargaining power at the marketplace, and enabling better commercialization of agricultural produce in regional and international markets.
Modern cold technology is often out of reach for off-grid communities due to its cost, a lack of access to reliable electricity, and the diverse and uncoordinated stakeholders in the broader ecosystem.
Through the 2018-19 Global LEAP Off-Grid Cold Chain Challenge (OGCCC) CLASP worked to identify and promote the most energy-efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective technologies that can meet the cold storage requirements for fresh fruits, vegetables, and dairy products in five African countries: Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Building on the work of the OGCCC, CLASP will soon develop a comprehensive market assessment of the potential, opportunities, and barriers for off-grid cold chain technologies.
Milling & Grain Processing
While diesel-powered milling equipment is common throughout developing economies, they are expensive to operate, difficult to run, and harmful to the environment. Solar mills offer a sustainable alternative with numerous benefits for women and girls.
Women in Africa spend a collective 40 billion hours each year on milling.
Understanding Nascent Technologies
Solar milling has the potential to become one of the most important off-grid agricultural technologies due to its universal need in off-grid communities and its ability to improve the opportunities for women and girls. In Africa, women spend 40 billion hours milling each year without compensation. Automating the milling process would free up valuable time for education or income-generating pursuits.
Solar milling is a complex process. Scaling the market will be an involved process requiring significant innovation across multiple engineering disciplines and business models. CLASP recently partnered with Agsol to conduct field testing of solar mills to understand the technology and market requirements needed to close the commercial viability gap.
Before I bought the pump,Galiwango Geofrey
I would not manage to
provide enough water to
crops during the dry season
and I was losing out.
coffee and banana farmer, Uganda