A non-profit foundation started up by US installer SolarCity to tackle energy poverty has started accepting public donations for its programmes to put solar-powered lighting in schools.
GivePower was set up around a year and a half ago, and by the end of 2014 had donated the lights to 511 schools in regions including Central America and Africa. The foundation was originally set up with the aim of roughly matching each megawatt of solar SolarCity installs in the US by SolarCity with the installation of solar lights at a school in a developing country.
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Adding solar lighting coupled with batteries means classroom hours can be extended and communities can have well-lit gathering places for evenings, while the panels can also power small DC-electronic devices such as mobile phones.
SolarCity said yesterday that it has received a donation of half a million dollars from Bank of America Charitable Foundation which will enable GivePower to light up another 1,000 schools before the end of this year.
Bank of America’s US$500,000 grant will, SolarCity said, “support hundreds of school lighting projects as well as solar training, research and development in off-grid communities”.
The installer and leasing company also announced that the foundation is now able to accept charitable donations from the public, having attained the requisite status. Members of the public can donate at www.givepowerfoundation.org.
Other international solar industry players have seen rural lighting and energy poverty alleviation projects as a suitable avenue for their charitable or corporate social responsibility activities. UK developer Solarcentury founded SolarAid, which replaces the use of polluting and expensive kerosene lamps in Africa with solar lights.
These charitable ventures are likely to have a lot of work ahead of them. SolarCity says that this year, the GivePower foundation will execute projects in Mali, Nicaragua, Kenya, Haiti, Uganda, Nigeria, Malawi, Nepal and Ghana, citing figures from the UN Development Programme that show almost 300 million children worldwide go to school in their early years without electricity.