Shakti has now set up 45 technology centers to produce and repair solar accessories. In this way production moves from the capital to the villages and solves problems of cost, logistics and rapid growth in a highly decentralized company.
The centers are managed by women engineers, who - like their male colleagues - live, work and train in rural communities. Of importance here is how these technology centers function as incubators for a further innovation: the village energy entrepreneur.
Kohinur, for example was trained at a technology center to become an energy entrepreneur. She earns an income producing and repairing solar accessories, is self-employed and receives ongoing support from the technology centers for her business. Neighbors now bring Kohinur solar lamps for minor repairs instead of contacting the Shakti branch. The technology center engineers supervise Kohinur's work and do quality control.
Kohinur dropped out of school in the 8th grade, had no vocational training and no source of income, but is now able to contribute on average Taka 5,000 per month to her family's income. This is as much as her father earns delivering fresh fish to the shipping port in Khulna and a substantial increase in monthly income for a poor family.
Kohinur's story can be the story of the 1.3 billion people around the world without electricity access. But what we hear over and over again is that renewable energy technologies like solar are expensive and the rural poor are either too poor or too difficult to serve. The Grameen Shakti story explained in the book, Green Energy for a Billion Poor clearly shows how outdated and out of touch this line of thinking is.
With over five million villagers enjoying solar electricity and Shakti technicians installing one thousand solar systems a day it's time our development institutions put their scarce development dollars behind initiatives such as these. No one can work miracles in a traditional rural society, but entrepreneurial companies like Shakti are proving we can do far, far better than business as usual.
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Nancy Wimmer is Director of microSOLAR and author of "Green Energy for a Billion Poor- How Grameen Shakti Created a Winning Model for Social Business."
This article first appeared in Compass, the Sierra Club's blog.
