Power a Village, Empower Community, The challenges of planting sustainable community-owned electricity and education businesses in under-developed countries

Wednesday 9 Nov 2016, 18:00 → 20:00 Europe/Stockholm

FD5 Svedbergsalen (AlbaNova)

In 2009 IEEE took on a challenge to stimulate some of its 430,000 members to visualize ways to help eliminate global poverty and to mobilize actions, in conjunction with on-the-ground partners, to demonstrate successful pilot programs with potential to grow a significant lasting impact. One of the three critical electrical engineering challenges chosen was Reliable Electricity, which means electricity from an unreliable grid or is not available at all. This led to an important early partnership with educators familiar with the difficulties of serving extremely poor areas which resulted in a new way to deliver electricity and broad education together so that any solutions delivered would be sustainable and eventually owned and operated by the people they are intended to help. This program therefore has three main pillars: Entrepreneurial Electricity, entrepreneurial Community Based Education, and entrepreneurial Sustainable Scalable Business Models for both aspects. This presentation will describe the field and social conditions that the model is trying to meet through the development of standard solutions for renewable electricity and education systems such as currently operating in Haiti, Cameroon, Nigeria, South Sudan, Zambia, plus several new African countries and Indian states starting up in 2016. The program has the support of IEEE corporate, IEEE Foundation, a number of IEEE Societies and a growing number of private foundations and donors. IEEE Smart village itself is very much a new startup with the added handicap that the vast majority of its workers are unpaid volunteers. Ray Larsen is former Head of the Electronics Department at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, a Past President of IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society, and a Life Fellow of IEEE. He is Founder of the IEEE non-profit Community Solutions Initiative which later became IEEE Smart Village supported by IEEE Foundation in 2014. The lecture is organized by IEEE Sweden Kommer ni tidigare kan ni få kaffe eller te.