From the GVEP blog

In rural, off-grid African communities solar PV is almost certainly the best option for providing clean, afordable electricity for lighting, phone charging and appliances like radios and TVs. But while sales are growing the barriers to reaching scale are still formidable. The opportunity and the challenges are well articulated in this recent article by Carl Pope, a [...]

I was recently reporting some results for The Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA) regarding the number of improved stoves that GVEP International supported businesses sold in the period of Jan – Dec 2011. Although I have been working with these businesses and visited many of their production sites I was still amazed to collectively [...]

A coalition of energy operators including EDF, 2iE, FDE, and AMADER (Malian Agency for the Development of Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification) presented the launch of the first two test trainings to energy operators in Ouagadougou last week. The trainings are part of the EU Energy Facility programme to which GVEP is adhering by sponsoring [...]

During March this year a ‘human centered design’ consultancycalled IDEO visited Tanzania to look at cooking stoves. GVEP staff helped faciliate their visit to Mwanza. They later moved on to Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. The IDEO team spent time cooking, shopping and talking with the people who buy stoves – trying to understand how they cook, why [...]

Last Friday I went to a talk by Prof. Kirk Smith, one of the world’s leading experts on the health risks from household air pollution.  Kirk is based at the University of California, Berkley and has spent 30 years working on issues relating to the inhallation of harmful gasses and particulates from open fires and [...]

We are currently completing assessments of the stoves market in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania for the Global Alliance on Clean Cookstoves. It has been an interesting exercise highlighting a range of challenges and opportunities. Improved cokstoves have been promoted in Kenya since the 1980s and are now very widely used in urban and peri-urban households. Penetration rates are [...]

Over recent years a number of development programmes in East Africa have together incubated hundreds of micro-scale businesses at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). But what avenues of growth should we expect from the small-scale energy enterprises seeking to make a bigger impact? I read last week about a start-up social enterprise providing low-cost [...]