Solar Village Project has made substantial progress since we began operating in the summer of 2014. This report summarizes the projects we have implemented and describes the communities we with which we work. It also includes a financial summary and brief look at our future plans.
Annual Report
Joe Kselman
A MESSAGE FROM SVP FOUNDER/ DIRECTOR Dear Friends, This past year has brought a number of extraordinary accomplishments for Solar Village Project. We successfully expanded our mission into Africa with our Cisse Masse Solar Village Project in Senegal, completed our 3 and largest Solar Village Project in India with the Rangpur Solar Village Project, and received our first grant from The Island Foundation. rd
The progress we’ve made has been truly remarkable, primarily because so much of it comes from the efforts of many people working together and contributing funds to advance our mission. The hard work and dedication of everyone involved is the reason Solar Village Project has been able to grow so rapidly. It has been a very powerful and humbling experience for me to see this support. From our generous donors to our dedicated team of volunteers here and across the globe, we literally are creating a brighter future for those most in need. It's hard to describe in words the impact these projects have on the villages we work with because words don't properly relate a reality that can only be truly understood through the experience of being there. None the less, two things that stand out best describe the impact of what we do. The first is that every time we visit a village before implementing a project I hear over and over about how hard the people have to struggle to survive. Phrases like ”no one thinks about us”, ”no one wants to help us” and “we are all alone here” are common. The people have no hope and no belief that things will get better for them because they have been ignored for so long. The second thing happens on the day after the project has been implemented, when we return to see how they felt about their first night with light. Every time the villagers are extremely grateful and enthusiastic, but what is most inspiring is the hope I see in their faces that says, for once we have not been forgotten. Joe Kselman Executive Director, Solar Village Project
STATISTICS Number of Solar Power Units Distributed 1150
Number Of People Supported 2000
Number Of Homes Electrified 475
Number of village projects implemented 4
Additional hours of light available per day 5 Average monthly savings versus kerosene
10%
Average number of children per home 3
2015 – 2016 FINANCES Solar Village Project became a registered 501 (c)( 3) Non- Profit Organization in the spring of 2015. Since its official designation as a non- profit organization SVP has raised over $32,000 beyond the $5000 raised before we became a nonprofit organization. Over the past two years SVP has implemented four full- scale village projects, 3 in India and one in Senegal, bringing light and power to over 2000 people. Until recently, all the money raised has come from individual donations, primarily on a project to project fundraising basis. 78% of the funds raised were used to purchase the Solar Lights that are distributed in the villages in which we have worked. 15% of the funds raised went into project implementation costs such as travel, lodging, in- country logistics and local staff stipends. The remaining 7% went towards operational costs such as website hosting, promotional event fees, print materials (i.e. banners, infographic design, patches, stickers,) and bank fees. For the Rangpur Solar Village Project Fundraiser 50% of the $15,000 raised came through Maia Monell of the Minga Foundation, along with her teammates at the Cass Business School in London. They ran an Indiegogo fundraiser on our behalf as a class project. In August of 2016 SVP was awarded its first grant in the amount of $4500 from the Island Foundation (http://islandfdn.org). The funds from this grant are to be allocated for projects and general administration. As of today Solar Village Project has a positive balance of $8,233.
Project Summary Four full scale Solar Village Projects have been completed over the course of the past two years.
The Gauterine Solar Village Project, 75 homes – June 2014 The Kihare Solar Village Project, 150 homes – July 2015 The Cisse Masse Solar Village Project, 65 homes – February 2016 The Rangpur Solar Village Project, 200 homes – April 2016
With each successive project, we’ve refined our implementation model in many ways, allowing us to increase the size, scope and quality of our work. Gauterine village was the site of our first project where we distributed 75 solar lighting systems, one for every home in the village. These systems contained NiCad batteries which we learned don’t do well in extreme heat. Over time our local managers reported an unfortunately high number of system failures. In order to ensure that the Gauterine project remained sustainable in the long term, we went back and distributed 75 new and improved lights in Gauterine in conjunction with the Rangpur project in the Spring of 2016. In the picture below on the left is the Luminous Solar Home Lighting System we used in Gauterine in 2014. Many of the recipients whose units failed were resourceful enough to have the battery replaced on their own. This was significant in and of itself because it meant that they had come to see access to electricity as a necessity rather than a luxury. Nonetheless we didn’t want to leave the people of Gauterine with what turned out to be a less dependable system, and so we went back and distributed a much higher quality light/cell phone charger, the Dlight S100 seen below on the right.
Having learned from our Gauterine Project (system on the left) we decided to use a more durable and higher quality system for our 2nd project, the Kihare Solar Village Project. For Kihare we needed a system that would last at least 2 years without any need for routine maintenance and which included a full warranty. After doing extensive research we settled on using D Light, a company at the forefront of the solar lighting industry in
India with an excellent reputation. After negotiating with the in- country representatives we settled on a 3 light system. We installed one S300 (left) and two S20’s (right) for all 150 homes in Kihare.
In the February of 2016 board members Mike Varhola and Makhtar Drame successfully expanded our organization’s reach and implemented our first project in Senegal, the Cisse Masse Solar Village Project. Makhtar traveled to Senegal in November to survey the village and returned later that month with the news that the people of Cisse Masse were ready to work with us. For the Cisse Masse project we worked with a local solar distributor in the capital city of Dakar to source the solar units for the project. After ordering and testing a sample we concluded that the Ba Leaf Lighting system seen below would be the system used for the Cisse Masse Solar Village Project. The Ba Leaf was the most powerful system we have used to date. It came with a 10 watt solar panel, 3 bright lights and a cell phone charger. Every home in Cisse Masse received 1 of the Ba Leaf systems.
In the spring of 2016 we implemented the Rangpur Solar Village Project (Bihar, India). For this project we wanted to find a way to reduce the cost of the project especially because of the size of the village with 200 homes. We also needed to distribute new lights in Gauterine. In order to do so we worked with Dlight again,
and also an Indian solar product supplier called Bottom Of The Pyramid. We decided to work with Bottom Of The Pyramid after thoroughly testing their Prakhar 30 seen on the left below. The Prakhar 30 light has comparable technical specifications to the S20 but cost significantly less. For primary lighting and cell phone charging purposes we decided to stay with the Dlight S300 because we couldn’t find a better system. As our projects have grown, so have our capacity building efforts. In accordance with a number of recommendations made by the Minga Foundation we have successfully instituted strategies to help us grow as an organization. We are now in the process of registering SVP in India and Senegal in order to better facilitate project logistics, which includes organizing a local chapter of SVP to better oversee and manage the projects in the long term. Starting with the Cisse Masse project, village leaders now sign a community partnership agreement which emphasizes the idea that the project is a long term and ongoing collaboration. By demonstrating that we are there to work as a partner with villagers, we hope to engender a sense of communal responsibility for helping us oversee the projects over the years. Most significantly, as we’ve grown we’ve refined our strategy for distributing and surveying the recipients of the solar lighting systems by using the government-supplied ration cards to register each household. With the ration card, we have begun to gather basic demographic data in order to better understand the living conditions of the people with whom we work, and to compare the data with future survey results.
FUTURE PLANS Currently we are in the process of testing a number of different solar lights that are more affordable while just as durable as the D lights, which we hope to use in our future projects. The units we select from the samples we are testing will be used in our upcoming projects in Senegal which will be implemented in the winter of 2017. For the next round of projects in Senegal we have the ambitious goal of implementing 7 different village projects assisting approximately 2,500 people. In the spring of 2017 we look forward to another Solar Village Project in India.
OUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Executive Director – Joe Kselman Vice President – Mike Varhola Board Secretary – Claudia Kselman Treasurer – Joshua Ho Cristeen Kselman Sunil Sharma Makhtar Drame Susan Hendel Ronni Hendel Sandesh Jadhav Ketaki Jadhav Saksham Chawla Shyam Mehrotra Kate Kennedy Kerry Schnieder
