Powering Needs, Empowering Lives

01/24/22 • 39 min

Some 800 million people globally – as many as a quarter of them in India – have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from modern industrial and digital livelihoods. In short, a key determinant of social equity goes missing.

Harish Hande, an energy engineer, started SELCO in 1995 to pioneer the delivery of decentralized solar power to India’s rural poor. He built an entire ecosystem around their needs: system designs tailored to their unique demands, affordable financing fit to their cash flow, culturally attuned service providers, and a network of partners dedicated to solving their hyper-specific problems. While other companies shunned the poor as unprofitable, Hande built a profitable business by catering to them. Through the non-profit SELCO Foundation, he’s now scaling up by nurturing other companies and nonprofits to replicate his model–across India and in other developing countries in Asia and Africa. This episode tells Hande’s story.

For the full transcript go to www.ssir.org/podcasts

For the full transcript go to www.ssir.org/podcasts

Previous Episode

Healing From Trauma

The Northern Triangle countries of Latin America are some of the most violent in the world. El Salvador and Honduras have ranked among the highest murder rates for years. It’s not only the gang violence we hear most about, but also domestic abuse and gender-based violence. And the trauma it leaves behind has a devastating effect on entire communities, from the hospital staff who treat victims to police officers patrolling the streets—and especially on children and their ability to learn.

Celina de Sola spent a career in humanitarian aid work before returning to her hometown of San Salvador in 2007 to look for a way to protect children from violence. With her husband, Ken Baker, and brother Diego, she started with a single volunteer-led after-school club for kids in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Today, Glasswing International equips schools, hospitals, and police forces with the knowledge and training to overcome the debilitating effects of violence-induced trauma. To date, Glasswing has reached more than 2 million children and adults in nine countries across Latin America—as well as in New York City. And it’s partnering with national governments to further scale up a “trauma-informed ecosystem” that not only improves students’ academic performance and resilience, but also creates a restorative antidote to help break the cycle of violence. This episode tells Glasswing’s story, including: