SELCO Foundation is a collaborative that strives to inspire and support champions of sustainability across the world. SELCO Foundation’s approach is an iterative process that leads to innovation in products, services, and systems around alternative energy access.
In India alone, 240 million people have little or no access to electricity in a country where it comes at a higher cost for the poor and underserved.
SELCO works to develop an end-to-end, holistic energy access model focused on alleviating poverty in a sustainable manner.
Harish installed the first 1000 home lighting systems himself, and SELCO has installed 450,000 systems since.
SELCO’s direct energy interventions have provided 7.5 million people with lighting and energy products for homes, livelihoods, schools, and health centers.
Creating and enabling conditions for viable last mile energy solutions for poor people across varied contexts: access to affordable financing, appropriate technology, nurturing local energy enterprises, practitioner-driven policy,and inclusive design.
Creating and enabling conditions for viable last-mile energy solutions for people living in poverty across varied contexts: access to affordable financing, appropriate SELCO’s holistic models have been adopted across India and are being replicated in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of South Asia through an ecosystems building approach. Over the next five years, 10 million people will have the potential to lift themselves out of poverty.
Harish Hande
After visiting the Dominican Republic and seeing how simple solar energy solutions had an impact on people in areas of poverty worse than India, Harish focused on solar electrification in rural areas of India. He returned to India in 1994 to start SELCO India, a for-profit social enterprise that provides affordable renewable energy services to poor, rural Indian households. Harish installed the first 1000 home lighting systems himself, and since SELCO India has installed 450,000 interventions since. In 2010, Harish founded SELCO Foundation, as an open source platform to create solutions linking sustainable energy to poverty eradication. The inspiration for setting up the SELCO Foundation and subsequently SELCO Incubation and SELCO Impact Fund came from the realization that SELCO-India had much learning from its decade and a half of operations that could help accelerate energy access and this knowledge could be effectively tapped by potential social entrepreneurs from different parts of the world to flatten their own learning curve.
Harish envisioned that the solutions developed by the lab could be replicated within India and other developing economies through a global replication effort in association with local partners. The SELCO Foundation is working in the Philippines and Tanzania as part of its global replication work.
Today, Harish is widely regarded across the globe as a pioneer of sustainable decentralized rural energy solutions. In 2011, Harish was awarded with Asia's Ramon Magsaysay Award, often referred to as Asia's Nobel Prize, for “his pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor". In 2012, he was appointed an expert on the solar committee at India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. Harish graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and earned his PhD in energy engineering at the University of Massachusetts.
SELCO’s direct energy interventions reached over 585,000 households and 2.9 million people with home lighting systems and financing access. An additional 4.6 million people are estimated to be reached directly through energy-efficient products (e.g., solar-powered sewing machine) and in energy-efficient institutions like schools and health centers. Their reach extends to more than 15 states in India. India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development has included SELCO’s livelihoods interventions among their bankable project and database, which is validation for the bank’s regional offices to promote and offer financial services for their interventions. In Assam, a Northeast state in India, India’s national government has partnered SELCO to co-design the Atal Innovation Centre that will incubate and mentor energy and technology enterprises led by young individuals from the grassroots of India.
What can we learn about resilience from street vendors? Just about everything, says Harish Hande of SELCO, an organization that delivers decentralized solar energy to the poor in India. Tackling…
