A big vision for scaling up

Here's another tale that involves scaleability, African and otherwise. In Nairobi, on the way home, we met a chap called Fred. Fred was trained two years ago to wire solar chargers. Fred then lived in a Nairobi slum. He took his tiny savings, bought the raw materials for two chargers, wired them up them, designed a professional looking frame and sold them. With the profits he bought four, made them and sold them. And so on.

Now, seventy people work for Fred. He is in Zambia and then Malawi at the moment, doing training for us. As for non-African scaleability, we met all the agencies you need to in Lilongwe, the capital. Everyone, form the Malawian government, through the UN, to the Brits, wanted to help. Our most encouraging meeting was actually at the British High Commission and the UK Department for International Development. A senior official there heard our story, and how we have similar operations on the ground now in Tanzania and Zambia. He thought for a moment and said: why don't you try to replace every kerosene lantern in Africa? Nick and I looked at each other. It's not often we are out-ambitioned by British government officials.

He explained how it could be done, in principle. We would propose a mega-project signed on to by all African governments that would go to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Climate Convention for accreditation. The CDM entails organisations hard-pressed to make carbon cuts in the North paying for cuts made in solar lanterns substituted for kerosene ones in the South (such as the converted lantern in the photo). This would be bound to appeal to African governments, the UK official said, because so far most of the CDM $millions have gone to Asia and Latin America, where it's easier to pull big projects together than it is in Africa. Nick and I went away gratefully and are working on this.

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