Rural villager in India dreams up multiple ways to use our SoLite: 1) Headlamp!
After a long hiatus from maintaining an updated blog (we’ve been busy, just not with our blog…), we’re back!
Please check back often as we plan to bring more stories, Angaza developments, photos, and exciting news to the forefront! Also, please Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter for even more regular notifications.
Here’s to a great 2012!
The Silicon Valley Business Journal published an article on Angaza today: Check it out!
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/09/13/smallb4.html
Awesome day in King’ori! Where to start? We’d like to introduce you to two awesome individuals we met in the beautiful village of King’ori: John and Julia.
John, a local of King'ori, has built his own house lighting system by taking apart flashlights and has succeeded in completely eliminating kerosene from his life.
We entered John’s house expecting to ask him our quick survey questions and be on our way to our next survey subject, but after asking him the question “how much do you spend on kerosene per week?” and having his response be “nothing,” I knew he would not just be another data point on our village surveys.
John has completely eliminated kerosene from his life by building his own
Small LEDs taken from flashlights now light John's home at night.
household lighting system by taking out the LED guts of flashlights and wiring them up to 4 D batteries and a switch. He has mounted one LED ring on the ceiling in each of the three small rooms in his house and only has to change the batteries every 4 months. It was a truly impressive home-built lighting system and even more rewarding to see John’s excitement in showing it to us. He explained his plans to improve the system, which he had built 6 months ago, by switching to a car battery and brighter lights, and adding a switch to each room so he could individually control each light. John has succeeded in cleanly lighting his home at night and eliminating expensive kerosene from his life, and from an engineering perspective, I was thoroughly humbled by his self-built home lighting system.
Julia, Godlisten's daughter, shows us her nightly routine of studying by kerosene lantern for two hours every night.
After dark, we returned to Godlisten’s house to pay another visit. This time, we wanted to see how his family and children used kerosene at night, after hearing them talk about it earlier. Julia, his young teenage daughter, who is a student in secondary school, eagerly showed us how she used kerosene to study. She always sits at the table in their entry room and reads her history, English, and biology notes from her hand-made notebooks. She showed us where her siblings and neighbors sit with her every night, and explained that it was more difficult to study by their family’s flashlight because the light was too directed to illuminate her entire notebook. Julia is the perfect example of our goal to make our lights bright enough to read by, disperse enough for multiple people to share it at once, and affordable enough so families like Godlisten’s can light their homes without depending on kerosene.
Gloria and her children was one of many families we surveyed in Mateves. She had considered getting solar but thought she would have to save up for at least two years to be able to afford it.
Today we headed west to Mateves, a large village on the plains of the Arusha region. Mateves has a wide disparity in the incomes of the people living there. The houses near the main highway are quite large, well built and electrically powered, but the houses scattered among the corn fields are small mud structures like we have found in other villages. These people live in totally different worlds, and it was very clear that they have very different needs. We focused on visiting with the families living off-grid and asked them questions similar to the survey we had in King’ori. The answers they’ve given us have revealed just how much the financial situation of the people here varies. One family can be struggling to light their home and feed their family, while their neighbors can easily afford to power a large stereo system with batteries twice a week. There is a great opportunity for us to make solar affordable for everyone, so it is not merely a solution for the wealthy.
We spoke with a group of children who study by kerosene every night. Their favorite subjects ranged from math to English to science, but they all agreed studying by the dim light of their lantern was difficult. We also spoke to many families who expected to pay the equivalent of several year’s income to purchase a traditional solar home system to light their homes and charge cell phones. We could save them from making this huge sacrifice by bringing bright light to their homes at a price they can afford. These people need a product like ours, and we can’t wait to bring it to them!
Today we ventured out towards Moshi, east of Arusha, to a village called King’ori. Like many villages near the main roads, only the stores near the road had electricity and all the houses in the village away from the road did not. After getting the village leader’s permission to walk around the village and speak to people, we set out, with no plan, seeing what we would find. Our goal: conduct a “mass” survey with at least 30 people to answer questions such as: how much did they pay for their cell phones?, where did they buy them?, had they ever bought anything over 55,000 Tanzanian shillings (about 45 bucks)?
Godlisten and his children try our lights on the table the children use every night to study by kerosene lantern.
But what started as 10 simple questions to ask people, turned into a conversation with at least 10 villagers. They were excited to see our prototype, started asking many questions (how much? where could they get it? how long did the battery last?) and some were even ready to buy it on the spot. One man, Godlisten, who took us back to his house to talk with him, introduced us to all his children and told us he wanted our light to light the table they study at every night. As we were ending our questions, he asked if we would leave our name and number so he could call us in two weeks to buy our product once he got the money. It’s true, the need is glaringly prevalent, and we had multiple people excited and able to buy our product on the spot. It was both convincing evidence that we have developed a product that fits rural villager’s needs as well as a validation that they will use electricity for all the reasons we had hoped: giving light for children to study, saving money on cell phone charging to use for other things, etc. etc.
And so, we’re off to another day, with no knowledge of the adventures we’ll come across today! More to come…
Yesterday late afternoon and early evening, we got ahold of a local village leader we had met on our previous trip, Songoyo, and returned to Ilkiding’a with our prototypes. Last trip, Songoyo was the first person we had an in-depth interview with, and he happily received us again this trip.
… But much had changed. He looked older and much more tired. He and his family had gone six months without light… not even kerosene. They could no longer afford to spend $1/week on kerosene. To eat, they were getting food from the government. Because this year there was a bad harvest and their normal bi-annual influx of income had equated to nothing. However, despite the hardships Songoyo and his family have endured over the past 6 months since we saw him last, they continue to be hopeful and cheerful. His children showed us their schoolbooks and writing notebooks and helped us determine what was a good level of light to effectively read by. Songoyo warmly received us in to his home and explained to us how he would mount a solar panel, where he would put the light, and how charging his cell phone in his home would save him a trip to Arusha every three days to charge it.
It was a very helpful meeting, yet, as we left, it felt very weird showing him and his family bright lights and opportunity and then packing them up and leaving, only to live a light-less life once again. I hope that we are able to design an affordable product that Songoyo can afford after a good harvest that will give his children and him bright light for years after. As a thankyou, we left him with one of our small LED lanterns, which visibly lit up the smile on his children’s faces (pun intended)… and though it was not the bright, disperse light we hope to achieve with our product, I have no doubt it will have a considerable impact on their family.
Thank you Songoyo!
At Angaza we have various levels of Swahili ability, from people just starting to learn to people almost ready to rap Bongo Flava. At our meetings we try to pick up a new word or phrase, so even the newest members of our team can act cool on the streets of Dar es Salaam. Yesterday’s Word of the Day was NDIZI, which means banana. Or more like plantain, in this common dish. Also useful is poa kuchisi kama ndizi, or, roughly, “crazy cool like a banana.”
As thanks for your interest in Angaza, we’d love for you to join in. One of the best tools on the Internet for Swahili acquisition is the Kamusi Project started at Yale University. It’s a living bilingual dictionary maintained by volunteers like you and me. Give it a look and see if you can leave a comment in Swahili.
We had an insightful and inspiring meeting with one of the co-founders of Greenlight Planet this week.
Greenlight Planet, which currently operates in India, shares our passion for making clean, safe, and affordable light accessible to base-of-the pyramid customers. The conversation covered everything from product features to pricing and customer payment, to the critical challenge of distribution that faces all companies selling to the BoP. It was an incredible opportunity to learn from a company already operating in the space and sparked plenty of new ideas.
While outsiders might view us as potential competitors, we both recognize that with 1.6 billion lacking access to electricity, there’s plenty of room to operate and that we need more people, rather than less, trying to tackle the problem.
