Project Details

General Information

Most rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa share the common challenges of limited access to energy and education. As a result, they are heavily dependent on fossil fuels like Kerosene, a financial burden on households since it is 10~20% of their income. Its fume causes respiratory disease and from a global perspective, its CO2 emissions affects to global climate change.
Another problem is education where 1 in 5 children are exposed to child labor that affects their school attendance and dropouts. Limited access to education, almost the only way out of poverty, perpetuates the cycle of poverty, early marriage, low economic power, and child labor.
To help tackle both problems, we installed Solar Cow; solar charging systems comprised of solar panels, storage batteries and charging stations that can charge over hundreds portable batteries (known as “Solar Milk”) at once, at schools. Each student is given a Solar Milk battery to charge while they attend class, which they then take home to their families at the end of each school day.
A Solar Milk battery can be used as a light. This affordable, clean, and sustainable power source creates an immediate and tangible incentive for parents to send their children to school.

Creative Solution (Creativity/Innovation)

By distributing energy through children who come to school, Solar Cow simultaneously solves two very different problems, energy excess and child labour. Furthermore, Solar Cow is more cost effective than alternatives such as grid connection and solar home systems since it requires neither transmission infrastructure to individual household nor visit individuals who are widely dispersed in rural areas. Milk batteries feature a customized charging module that is only compatible with Solar Cows, so that the batteries are essentially useless without coming to solar cows/school and thereby minimize the probability of being misused and flowing into black markets.

Social Impact (Inspiration/Impact)

Students’ attendance has increased and lowered the drop out rate significantly. Education contributes to break vicious cycle of poverty by providing opportunity for better future. It will create society with hope.
Since it isn’t scale of problem that one social venture can solve, YOLK launched AYANTU coffee that uses 10% of its revenue on Solar Cow. When every cup of coffee is sold, one day of light in ethiopia will be turned on. Now people can easily participate by drinking coffee and it is a way of ripple into society. Who doesn’t drink coffee, right?

Participation/Cooperation

Charging over hundreds of portable batteries at the same time is quite challenging technology. It required high level engineering team to execute it in a right way. We partner up with a company “kkamnyang” that has specialty in the field.
We also worked with local NGOs for implementation of Solar Cow system in rural areas in Africa, Sincesince majority of the people in rural areas only use tribe language, we needed to cooperation cooperate with people/organization who know local culture, language, and etc, etc.

Vision for the Future

Child labour and low energy access are global scale problems. 72 Millionmillion African children are estimated to be in child labour. 365 million people are without electricity access. Solar Cow is an innovative solution that can solve these complex and intertwined issues effectively.
We plan to use funding from international organizations such as GCF(Global Climate Funding) since their mission, reducing CO2 emission, aligns with Solar Cow's impact; replacement of fossil fuel with solar energy.
Further more, AYANTU has potential to become symbolic F&B brand that enables people to directly support innovative solution like Solar Cow through their every day consumption.