Posted on 18 January 2013

Blogger: Kat Harrison, Social Impact and Research Manager

Twitter: @sunrise_kat

Tumblr: http://sunrisekat.tumblr.com

(Above: Research Assistants, Tanzania)

I expect you’re probably wondering what’s the latest with all this clever research we’re doing at SolarAid? Yes, I thought so. Well, mission completed: the first phase of our impact measurement function has been set up in Africa. Research Assistants recruited and trained in three of the four countries we work in (Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania) have all embarked on their first research project to answer questions like: do people who buy solar lights reduce kerosene use, do their children study for longer and do they notice any change in the health of their family?

So, with all this lovely data flowing we can focus on the next phase; using all the info to draw conclusions, spot trends and share learning. We’ll be sharing all this with you too of course and share it with other equally important people who haven’t heard of us yet, to convince them of what a strong argument we have and how they really ought to get on board and support us. And we’ll share it within the SolarAid family to make sure we make informed strategy decisions and improve upon our already rather good programme delivery.

As we like to make things look pretty at SolarAid, we’ll be working on some cool infographics to help us share our results. If you haven’t come across ‘infographics’, they’re basically visual representations of information, data or knowledge and according to Wikipedia are intended to present complex information quickly and clearly. Pretty useful little things for busy and important people like you who maybe don’t have time to read a long report. It’s not all about numbers and graphs though. We’ll also be sharing some great case studies of impact and feedback from solar-light users.

So look out for all of this and more.

Follow Kat on Twitter: @sunrise_kat

Catch up with Kat's blog: http://sunrisekat.tumblr.com