Green Technology To Create Economic Opportunities For Poor Urban Youth
Earthen Glow empowers poor urban youth with a business model that leverages distribution of clean energy to street vendors. Solar Charging Stations power self-contained, mobile LED lighting devices that are rented for a fee to street vendors.
Street Vendors are a part of almost all major cities in India. On an average every major city has between 10,000-25,000 street vendors. Almost all of these vendors use kerosene lamps for night time street hawking.
The change we drive into the world with this initiative is clean lighting and employment for the urban poor.
A propos de vous
A propos de vous
Prénom
Ramana
Nom
Gogula
Profil sur Facebook
A propos de votre organisation
Nom
Earthen Glow
Site Web
Pays
Inde, AP
Pays dans lesquels ce projet crée un impact social
Inde, AP
Votre organisation est-elle une
Entreprise
Depuis combien de temps votre organisation opère-t-elle ?
Moins d'un année
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Innovation
Titre du formulaire de participation
Green Technology To Create Economic Opportunities For Poor Urban Youth
Quels changements pensez-vous apporter ?
Earthen Glow empowers poor urban youth with a business model that leverages distribution of clean energy to street vendors. Solar Charging Stations power self-contained, mobile LED lighting devices that are rented for a fee to street vendors.
Street Vendors are a part of almost all major cities in India. On an average every major city has between 10,000-25,000 street vendors. Almost all of these vendors use kerosene lamps for night time street hawking.
The change we drive into the world with this initiative is clean lighting and employment for the urban poor.
Quelles sont les principales activités mises en place par le projet ?
Our first goal was to identify a cross-section of the urban poor who would benefit from being part of our initiative. We are in the process of developing a comprehensive training program that would bring in around 200 individuals/city into our program.
Being a technology company, our product design has been driven based on end user feedback. We have tied up with various street vendor associations to articulate our value proposition for their support.
In this process we have identified clear vendor segments that need clean lighting during their late evening & night sales. We are also looking at a franchise model that would be attractive for small business entrepreneurs to sponsor these solar charging stations.
En quoi votre initiative est-elle innovante ? Dans quelle mesure apporte-elle une contribution originale dans son domaine ?
There are three distinct areas we address:
(a) TECHNOLOGY: Our proprietary architecture ensures that we maximize the energy harvested from the SUN and optimize its storage into batteries. Our microprocessor based algorithms ensure fast charging of the lighting devices that we also design
(b) BUSINESS: Our business model ensures employment to poor urban youth and also drives small business entrepreneurship through our franchise model.
(c) ENVIRONMENT: We can also claim Carbon Credits for the amount of atmospheric CO2 emission that we save.
Even though there have been prior instances of similar implementation, they could not scale because of the way the technology was implemented, the lack of a larger community being involved and the ability to support & train the employees and entrepreneurs.
A quel étape votre projet en est-il ?
En place depuis moins d'un an
Comment décririez-vous la population auprès de laquelle vous travaillez ? Parlez-nous, par exemple, de la situation économique, des structures politiques, des normes et des valeurs, de l'évolution démographique, de l'histoire ou des précédentes expériences d'engagement communautaire.
Interacting with street vendor is almost inevitable in modern India. From vegetables, to fast foods, to flowers, to fruits and a host of other services, we deal with them on a daily basis.
There are more than 540 street vendor organizations, trade unions and community-based associations across 22 States of India. There are more than 12 million urban street vendors of India.
We are now at a point in time where these various vendor organizations can be reached with greater ease. If this clean lighting initiative can be successfully implemented in once city, it can be easily duplicated across similar geographies across the world.
Racontez l'histoire du fondateur et ce qui l'a inspiré à démarrer ce projet
Ramana Gogula, CEO of Earthen Glow has an MS in Alternative Energy from IIT, Kharagpur & an MS in Computer Science from LSU, USA.
Prior to starting Earthen Glow, he was Managing Director of Sybase - South East Asia and focused on building sales and marketing teams for the SE Asian market.
He later founded his own eLearning Company called Liqwid Krystal. As CEO of Liqwid Krystal, he focused on designing and building eLearning platforms for the international markets.
He is also a very successful musician & composer who produced many world music bands in the Bay Area, California. His own album "In Search Of A Soul" went on to be the #1 music video on MTV & Channel V in India. He has since composed film music for 25 films in South Indian Languages.
After a successful sabbatical stint in the entertainment industry, he has come full circle with Earthen Glow.
The company is built on a Vision to deliver clean light & water to over a billion people who have no access to the grid.
The Mission of the Company is to build affordable & sustainable clean energy technologies that leverage Solar Energy, Light Emitting Diodes(LED) and low energy consuming devices to improve the quality of rural households.
Impact social
This Entry is about (Issues)
Décrivez les résultats positifs obtenus par votre projet ainsi que la façon dont ils sont mesurés.
We are in the design phase of out project. We have completed building prototypes of out lighting devices and our Solar Charge Station.
We measure our success on the sustainability, community adaptation levels and the revenue model of our products and technology
Combien de personnes ont été touchées par votre projet ?
Moins de 100
Combien de personnes pourraient être touchées par votre projet au cours des trois prochaines années ?
Plus de 10,000
Quelle va être l'évolution de votre projet lors des trois prochaines années ?
We are a Clean Energy Company that currently focuses on facilitating clean light and water rural landscapes. We see our technology having immense applicability in the Urban terrain. The new sector that we are currently researching and building prototype is plug & play grid-based 40W/60W incandescent bulb replacement market.
Viabilité
Quels sont les obstacles qui pourraient entraver la réussite de votre projet et comment comptez-vous les surmonter ?
The greatest challenge for any new technology intervention is its community adaptation.
Hand-holding customers, providing technical support and building vendor support groups are key.
Quels sont vos différents partenariats ?
Our Technology Partner Citizen LED, Microchip USA, On Semiconductors
USA, Texas Instruments USA, Linear Technologies USA.
Our University Partner JNTU, Kakinada
Actuellement, quel est votre budget annuel (USD) ?
$50,001‐100,000
Expliquez vos choix.
Earthern Glow has been jump-started with personal funding of $20,000.
We have also boot strapped our Company with a project we did for JNTU University. Using these resources we have identified areas of growth and revenue generation. Working with regional government we have identified 50 villages where we can implement our technology. They have shortlisted 2 villages as pilot projects that we will be implementing over the next 3-6 months.
We have also taken our core technology components and diversified into other areas of growth such as solar water pumps, LED lighting for various verticals that are relevant to our strategy.
The street-vendor project has been sent as a proposal to a number of Corporations for sponsorship.
Comment pensez-vous pouvoir consolider votre projet au cours des trois prochaines années ?
Our success lies in implementing the Street Vendor project without a hitch in one city. On an average every city has around 10,000 street vendors. If we build a 100 Solar Charging Stations/City, we can generate revenues close to $2,000,000/city
Once we are confident of a successful implementation in once city, replicating it to all major cities in the country and expanding this around the world with similar requirements is a franchisee model.
Enjeux
Quels problèmes liés à l'emploi votre projet tente-t-il de résoudre ?
Veuillez sélectionner trois réponses par ordre d'importance
PRIMAIRE
Accès limité aux nouveaux marchés
SECONDAIRE
Compétences/formations insuffisantes
TERTIAIRE
Sous-emploi
Veuillez décrire la façon dont votre projet s'attaque spécifiquement aux problèmes cités ci-dessus.
In our case we are trying to move street vendors away from kerosene for lighting to self powered solar-LED lighting solutions. To push this advantage hard into the market, we are building sustainable, robust plug & play products. We train the urban youth on the technology and even structure the territories and sales models.
We break the city into regions and every region has a group of urban youth that we recruit to man and run our Solar Charge Stations. Each Solar stations powers up to 100 Lights that can be fast-charged during the day. In the evening the recruits go around distributing the lamps to the vendors in their region. Every vendor pays for the use of this clean light at a pre-defined rate. At $0.50 cents/lamp each charging station generates close to $18,250/annum.
De quelle façon comptez-vous accroître l'impact de votre organisation ou de votre projet ? Veuillez sélectionner trois moyens potentiels par ordre d'importance
Croissance géographique: à l'échelle mondiale
SECONDAIRE
Renforcement de l'impact existant grâce à la mise en place de services complémentaires
TERTIAIRE
Adaptation du projet à d'autres secteurs ou pour d'autres besoins en termes de développement
Veuillez indiquer les activités actuellement en place ou devant être mises en place dans un futur proche pour stimuler votre croissance.
Earthen Glow is a clean energy solutions company the focuses on off-grid rural landscapes. We are currently targeting India, Africa and South-East Asia as our primary markets. We build our own highly efficient solar energy harvesting and energy storage devices. We design our own LED drivers for our lighting solutions. We leverage these technology innovations into building applications to facilitate clean lighting and water in rural areas.
Our Solar Charging Stations are being tested in remote villages to facilitate community lighting. Miniature versions of these charging stations power individual homes with ceiling lights and hand-held lanterns.
The Solar Charging Station model that we applied to the street-vendors is easily adaptable multiple applications in rural landscapes.
Êtes-vous en collaboration avec : (plusieurs réponses possibles)
Organisme gouvernemental , un fournisseur de technologie, une ONG/organisation à but non lucratif, une université.
Si oui, dans quelle mesure ces partenariats ont-ils contribué à la réussite de votre projet ?
We are actively involved with the government into identifying remote villages that have lighting & water requirements. After having researched over 100 villages in South India, we have actually gone back to the drawing board to redesign our products to be more sustainable, robust and have the ability to able to function with as little human intervention as possible.
Our experience with the University (JNTU)where we applied our core architecture to design corridor lighting has been extremely well received and now we are in the process of designing a completely Green Campus for them.
We see NGOs & Non Profits as powerful vehicles to take our products and technologies into regions that we may never be able to reach.
 | il y a 101 semaines Ramana Gogula updated this Competition Entry. |
| il y a 101 semaines Ramana Gogula submitted this idea. |