With the call for entry for this year’s Global Climate Action Awards now open, we look back at some previous years’ winners, starting with Liter of Light, a grassroots movement that aims to provide affordable, sustainable solar light to people with limited or no access to electricity.
Give a man a fish, the old saying goes, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. If ever a climate action project illustrated that old adage, it is Liter of Light, a Manila-based social enterprise set up by Illac Diaz, which has brought light more than one million homes worldwide since it was started in 2011. It’s an idea both simple and profound: fill an old plastic bottle with 10ml of chlorine and filtered water, and glue it to a strip of metal roofing and then attach it to the roof of a house. During the day, the water refracts sunlight, projecting 55W of light into a room, meaning many households (often homes without windows) don’t need any electrical lights on at all during the day. The money they save on day-time electricity also means they can often afford to upgrade to Liter of Light’s second invention: community-built solar lighting technologies which work both day and night.
It’s also something that locals – using inexpensive materials – can install, so it creates jobs as locals can charge to install the lights, or rent them out to their neighbours. It’s an idea brilliant in both its conception and execution, and so it was no surprise when it won the inaugural Momentum For Change [now the Global Climate Action Awards] award back in 2011.
According to Illac, there are more than 30 million kerosene-powered lights in the Philippines, which causes a range of problems. “There are more than 7,000 islands in the Philippines, and so every two weeks, villagers have to leave their island and go back to the mainland to get gallons of kerosene in order to light their villages. Children often get burnt from the kerosene as well, and the journeys the villagers have to take to the mainland to get the kerosene are often dangerous too.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these issues: as tourism numbers shrank, so did revenue from tourism, meaning many villagers could no longer afford to replace their kerosene stocks. Luckily then, that Liter of Light has seen its footprint grow across the Philippines. “We now see hundreds of thousands of villagers creating their own self-built solar lighting,” Illac says.
However, it was another natural phenomenon that provided one of Liter of Light’s biggest Eureka moments. “When Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in 2013, we realized it would take us six months to place an order for solar lights and have them shipped in. That was when we decided to start making the solar lights ourselves, and in three weeks we were able to build 7,000 of them.”
The genius of Liter of Light’s model is that it empowers locals to set up their own businesses, free from reliance on outside businesses or NGOs. “The women-led cooperatives that get the solar panels, rent out the lights, and so they can build a business around that,” Illac says. And as repairs can be done simply (“You just need a screwdriver”), local money stays in the community. The ingenuity of the people continues to surprise Illac and his team. “Sometimes we give a village 100 solar lights, but then we come back and they have 300, so the explanation there is they actually learn how to get the parts and replicate it themselves. That would be scary if I was a business, but it’s wonderful when your goal is to solve the problem, not make a business out of it.”
The Global Climate Action award opened a lot of doors for Illac, and gave him some well-deserved recognition. “One big result of winning the award was we knew that introducing new models into the clean energy field were welcome, and these sorts of grassroots projects mattered, which was a big benefit to us,” Illac says.
The award also had an unexpected bonus. “We won the award in 2011 in Durban”, Illac says, “In COP21 in Paris, I met the people from the Peace Boat, and they invited me onboard. As a result, last year I spent three and a half months traveling to 19 countries, teaching people how to make solar lights. So really the award has given me the opportunity to network with people and as a result of that, I have opened offices in various countries around the world.”
One thing Illac has learned since starting Liter of Light is the power of youth. “One of the secrets of getting this project out into the world was asking young people to get involved. Too often we ask young people to generate awareness and little else, but when they get involved, they can generate huge change. That really helped ensure that this small-scale technology was multiplied by millions of people.”
Another profound moment was the realization that solar powered lights are just the start of what’s possible. “We started off by giving solar-powered lights to the female-led co-operatives, who rented them out,” Illac says. “Then we worked out how to make solar-powered mobile phone chargers, which are also rented out to the villagers. And now, we have put Raspberry Pi (tiny, low-cost single-board computers) inside those mobile phone chargers. This creates a localised intranet, where the villagers can chat with each other over their phones, all of it powered entirely by solar.” But, according to Illac, this sort of progress is as much about education as it is about technology. “Before you can put in this ‘mesh’ type of technology, you need to first teach the local women how to maintain the lights, then you put in the mobile chargers, then the mesh technology. The real power of what we do is to create a ‘power base’ that the women can maintain and repair, so that later on, educational technologies can be put on top.” That aptly illustrates the exponential growth of Liter of Light’s ethos, and just how powerful giving locals their own tools is.
For now, despite the upheaval caused by COVID-19, Illac’s vision is unwavering. “What we do is focused on empowering local people, so they can take part; it’s about turning over the business model to these locals, so they can earn money and become self-reliant. It’s better to put the technology of climate action in millions of hands, than in the hands of one or two ‘saviours.”
Applications are now open until April 30th for the 2021 Global Climate Action Awards. Click here to apply.
