Youth Challenge Sola Lait launches today

Youth Challenge Sola Lait launches today

Kerosene lamps cause serious indoor air pollution, claiming the lives of 1.5 million people each year, over half of which are under the age of five according to a Millennium Development Goals Report. Kerosene lamps also cause deaths by suffocation, poisoning and fatal house fires.

There is a better and cheaper way!

Costing just Vt1500 this sola lait aims to light up the lives of the 1.6 billion people in the world who live without access to mains electricity and instead rely on dangerous and dirty kerosene. The sola lait is now available for sale in Vanuatu from Youth Challenge thanks to AusAID’s Governance for Growth (GfG) program assistance. The Youth Challenge sola lait is powered by the sun so there is no need to buy batteries or kerosene.

Mr. Goldman started the company that makes the Youth Challenge Sola Laits when working as a peace corps volunteer in Africa. “I would lie at night in the village, looking up at the stars, and thinking how crazy it was that there were satellites up there orbiting the earth when down on the ground we were still sitting in the dark”

The light uses LED technology that uses 90 per cent less power than a traditional light bulb, and is 4 times brighter than kerosene.

A recent study in Bangladesh showed that household incomes rose by 30pc as a result of access to reliable solar light. A similar study in Gujarat India found a remarkable improvement in school children’s performance when they had access to solar lighting.

“I came to realise during my four years in Africa that government and NGOs were having little or no impact. It was businesses that were really changing lives, delivering technologies like mobile phones, computers and the internet”.

The hope is that the price and quality of this sola lait will enable it to sell as many as 100 million worldwide in the next decade.

“Vanuatu was the fastest growing country in the world for mobile phones, we think it can be the same for these sola laits” said Youth Challenge’s Ms Samson, “with this sola lait we could eliminate dangerous kerosene in Vanuatu homes in 3-4 years and contribute to Government’s objective of increasing access to safe and reliable power throughout Vanuatu”

But just as the spread of mobile phones was helped along by new business models, such as pre-paid credit and cheap phones, new approaches are being used to help spread these lights.

Youth Challenge is promoting the lights to local small entrepreneurs who are buying the laits by the box full to take back to their islands for Christmas and sell for a profit. “In this way we are moving beyond charity and clean cheap lighting is getting to rural Vanuatu,” said Ms Samson.

“There are other solar lights out there, but they are typically far more expensive and far poorer quality than the Youth Challenge sola lait,” said Ms Samson “for example, they have detachable solar panels, but these sola laits have built-in panels. They are fragile, but this sola lait can withstand a drop from a height of two metres.”

“Lack of access to good lighting is a cause of poverty, not just a result of poverty,” said Ms Samson “In communities on the islands of Vanuatu, solar energy has the power to transform lives.”

ENDS

© Scoop Media