Most afternoons while we're here are spent in the community. Essentially our little team consists of me, an Indian Young Professional - Sneha - and a "Pollinator" - Krishna.
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| One of the tent communities we visited |
The "Pollinators" are regular employees of Pollinate Energy. Their job is to visit the local communities, engage them in conversation and sell them various products.
Pollinate Energy has started out selling solar lights. Over 6000 people have currently benefited and this will increase to 10,000 in the next couple of months. The lights are a very simple yet effective technology that uses a solar panel that is put on the top of the household's tent and doubles as a mobile phone charger! These lights literally give light to households that were previously in darkness and this has a variety of benefits including increased time for children to do schoolwork for example.
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| Our Pollinator - Krishna - installing a solar light |
While the Young Professional group is here, Pollinate Energy is trialling a new product in these communities - the fuel efficient cookstove.
Cooking is generally done inside their tents using very inefficient burning of wood. The soot is pretty unbelievable, blackening the tops of the tents.
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You can see that the tent gets blacker and blacker the further
up you go. And this is only on the outside, the inside is
obviously much more apparent. |
The women and children are the ones exposed to very smoky environments (for the fire to burn, the women literally blow air into the fire using a tube). When installing one of the solar lights, I went into one of the tents where cooking was happening - for someone completely unused to this, the smoke was unbearable, eyes watering, coughing etc. And on average, a woman (and likely her children) will spend 4 hours in this environment!!!!
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You can kind of see the smokiness inside this
tent where we'd just installed a solar light! |
Other concerning facts about cooking include that a lot of fires are started by igniting plastic which is obviously terrible for your health (but widely available).
The cookstove that Pollinate is offering is not a perfect product, but does reduce smoke by around 50% and also the wood used by around 50% because of the fuel-efficient design of the stove. It's also portable and doesn't require blowing air into the fire.
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Sneha, Krishna and me! - trying out the cookstove at
home before going out into the community! |
Each afternoon we go to the community and explain the product and its benefits. We then do a little 'exhibition', making tea on the stove and then hopefully a person will agree to trial the product for a week. They pay 300 rupees (about $6) for a money-back trial for a week. If they like the product, then they will likely continue to pay via installments (total price for the cookstove is 1700 Rupees which is about $30. Keep in mind that a guesstimate of the average household weekly income for these communities is around 3500 rupees. Even if an average household is 4-5 people (often it is more) , that equates to about $2 a day.
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| Krishna explaining the benefits of the cookstove to the community |
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A lady and members of her community proudly trialling the
cookstove for a week! |
L xx
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