Elpis Solar

With over 68 million refugees, and internal climate related displacement on the rise, we live in the greatest era of mass migration. Affected communities often lack access to the most essential services (clean water, electricity, education) necessary for their development.

Our vision is to empower  marginalised communities around the world to lead a prosperous life wherever they go, re-instilling hope for their future. We have developed next-generation off-grid solar-tech solutions that catalyse the transformation of stagnant  refugee communities into places of opportunity and growth. Our off-grid solutions are operated by refugees (solar entrepreneurs) who enable essential services in their communities through our devices (water filtration, mobile phone charging, digital services and light).

With a current proof-of-concept deployment of 11 solar systems across 6 refugee camps in Europe and Africa, impacting more than 30,000 people per month, we have a validated approach that if scaled up will impact the lives of millions.

Refugee camps today, particularly in Asia and Africa are often unelectrified, with poor infrastructure and no opportunities for employment, education and civic engagement. In particular, Bangladesh currently hosts more than 723,000 Rohingya refugees since 2017 in 2 main registered refugee camps. Moreover, internally, rural communities have seen their vulnerability exposure to climatic extremes rising, with access to essential services often being constrained.

The lack of electricity in the camps reduces the potential for refugees to earn any income, and complicates economic participation with mobile money being a key financial vehicle across Asia and Africa. Concerns over water quality are leading many refugees to boil water which is resulting in the deforestation of the surrounding countryside. Furthermore, lack of lighting in the evening is compromising safety, particularly of women and girls. With a growing number of smartphone users, connectivity is also a problem due to financial barriers. This coupled with sparse in-camp educational opportunities for adults, means that many are left with little to no future employment prospects. 

These problem statements also hold true across refugee and rural communities in Europe, the Middle East (Jordan, Lebanon) and Africa (Rwanda, Uganda) and thus we have built our solar systems to address these key needs.

As politically driven dislocation is on the rise in neighbouring countries, as well as climate-mediated internal displacement increasingly takes presence, Bangladesh has now become a hot-spot of migration for thousands of refugees and internally displaced agricultural communities wishing to establish permanent settlements. Moreover,  urbanization and the increasing number of climate-stricken communities further strain public resources. Residents living in displaced communities, some of the most vulnerable individuals, are this project’s direct beneficiaries. 

We have adopted a validated learning approach, and have identified residents' specific needs and responded with a tech-solution that puts those people back in charge to provide for their own communities. With access to electricity being limited across locations and the water quality deteriorating, the use of our offgrid solar systems as a ‘business in a box’ solution goes hand in hand with the lack of employment found within refugee camps and rural villages.

After conducting preliminary market research, we have gathered key insights allowing us to offer tailored solutions. The message we have received is that our offerings are transforming lives, and empowering refugees in other countries to deliver critical services within their communities in a sustainable manner. We aim to bring and showcase this expertise in Bangladesh, too. 

Elpis Solar (Greek for “Hope”) was born out of a direct response to the influx of refugees who have been arriving in Europe since 2015. Large numbers have ended up in camps which often lack essential services such as electricity, information and clean drinking water. A group of students from the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with a Greek solar technology company developed two off-grid solar systems, a mobile phone charging system (SolarHub), and a charging system that also provides water filtration (Swapcy). The SolarHub powers 3600 phones per month, and Swapcy filters up to 9000 litres of water per month as well as charging 1200 phones and providing light in the evenings. Furthermore, all of our units include an integrated offline educational content platform that is made available via a local WiFi hotspot. This ‘Digital-Hub’ currently contains over 250GB of educational content in French and English (complete copies of Wikipedia sorted by subject, over 40,000 e-books, TEDx videos, interactive science games and others). Now anyone with a WiFi-capable phone can access this information without needing a connection to the internet.

Most importantly, the introduction of our solar systems into refugee camps provides a direct way to foster local civic engagement, as all our units are operated and maintained by refugees who then enable these essential services in their communities. Most recently we have worked with UNHCR, and the Rwandan Ministry of Refugees to provide entrepreneurial and business training to a cohort of refugees in Mahama Camp (the biggest one of its kind in Rwanda) as part of our pilot installation in July 2018. One year later, our installed units are still operating in the camp, and have empowered 4 refugees to become solar entrepreneurs and provide for themselves and their families, earning an average of 8000 Rwandan Francs per month (double the amount provided to them as their monthly allowance by camp authorities). In addition, thousands of people have benefited from the essential services they provide through our solar systems and as a result, demand is high for more of our solar stations,

Finally, we are also developing a solar module to be fitted to existing municipal street light poles. We aim to cross-subsidise our solar systems in refugee camps by selling these solar street light modules in MEDCs as a service, thereby generating a bi-directional low-carbon development pathway between MEDCs and LEDCs.

This project differentiates itself by providing solar infrastructure developed to address currently unmet needs in unelectrified settlements. Elpis Solar is uniquely positioned as it is the first to combine off-grid water filtration, mobile charging, provision of digital services and light at this scale. Often the provision of these services is not offered at a community scale since they lack a mechanism for residents to also benefit financially from the provision of services, as is the case with this project. The only comparable refugee project of this kind was a small-scale project managed by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) which provided solar charging and phones for some within the camp.

Finally, our technical innovation is also supplemented by novel business modelling. We are deploying a micro-entrepreneur model that empowers camp residents to run their own solar charging business. Unit managers will gain valuable skills and income, whilst some of the proceeds cover operational and maintenance costs. Finally we are also developing a range of solar-powered products that we will sell in MEDCs (more economically developed countries), in particular solar-street lighting - thereby creating a circular social business model that reinvests profits made from these low-carbon investments into direct impact in refugee camps abroad. Last but not least our digital services platform, will provide a direct way for digital service providers (humanitarian organisations, governments, private companies), to disseminate their content and advertise to a hard to reach and often neglected customer segment.

Mission Statement:

Our goal is for  Bangladeshi rural/semi urban and refugee populations to become self-sufficient and be able to enable essential services within their own communities. 

Activities:

We aim to start by deploying 12 units (6 Solar Hub & 6 Swapcy) across offgrid settings (and/or refugee camps) in Bangladesh, whilst providing entrepreneurship and business training to 12 solar entrepreneurs.

At the same time we will commence with prototyping our solar street light modules to be sold as a service in MEDCs and urban centers, starting with Switzerland where we already have received interest from the municipality of Wohlen.

Short Term Outcomes:

In the short-term this will result in thousands of litres of clean water every month along with access to free educational content and electricity for mobile phones, all provided by our solar entrepreneurs (See diagram for details).

We will also start establishing partnerships with municipalities in Switzerland and thus establish a key foothold in the market to start generating recurring revenues to expand our impact.  

Medium Term Outcomes:

In 2-3 years we will have empowered hundreds of refugees to run their own businesses and become self-sufficient. At the same time we will have built up a bidirectional low-carbon development pathway as we reduce emissions in MEDCs through our solar products, and through that also fund clean-tech projects in refugee camps. 

Long Term Outcomes:

After 5 years, in many camps the social dynamics will have changed, and refugee camps will become areas of opportunity rather than of frustration and poverty. 

In 2016 - 2017 we deployed 7 Solar Hubs in Greece with a  capacity to charge 25,200 phones per month. In summer 2018 we deployed two additional Solar Hubs (12 charging ports x 10h daily operation per unit) and two Swapcy units (8 charging ports + 300 litres of water-filtration per day) units in Mahama Camp, Rwanda, resulting in an added capacity of 9,600 phones charged and 18,000 litres of filtered water.

Feedback collected from camps has shown that average usage is 70% in Greece and 80% in Rwanda. Therefore, mobile phone charging in Greece translates to approximately 17,640 monthly charges, and 7,680 in Rwanda. Water filtration is used at its optimum with users utilising the free nature of the service, reaching the daily limit of 300 litres per day, per unit.

In 2020 - 2021 we plan to install an additional 12 units across 2 Bangladeshi camps with 3 Solar Hubs and 3 Swapcy units in each location.  A feasible projection for our impact would be the following:

1. Solar Hubs: Monthly rate of 17,280 charged phones and access to digital services.

1. Swapcy: Monthly rate of 54,000 litres of filtered water, 5,760 charged phones, evening light and digital services.  

In the long term, assuming organic growth and aggressive marketing to obtain both CSR related funding, Public Private Partnerships (PPP) and sustainable revenue generation from the micropayment scheme and light as a service model, we aim for a 10% increase in the number of annual installations in  off-grid rural communities,too.

After having obtained a proof-of-concept of our MVP empowering refugee communities in Rwanda, we now aim to scale-up and replicate our approach to serve the needs of more people. 

This year we will invest in R&D to upgrade our SWAPCY unit to incorporate UV water-filtration, thereby significantly reducing the replacement costs for the multiple currently installed ultrafiltration membranes. We also aim to increase the filtration capacity to 2000 litres per day. New developments will also encompass enabling remote-access on our in-camp digital platform. Here the goals are to start generating platform use-data, allow content to be updated remotely and to monitor the impact we are having (number of charges and users).

Next year we aim to start rolling out a first MVP of our modular solar street lighting systems in European markets (starting in Switzerland). Here we will pilot our light as a service model by leasing solar infrastructure to municipalities. Through this activity we will be able to fund more solar solutions for refugee camps, and further scale-up the micro entrepreneurial model and reach of the digital-hub. Through this revenue stream we aim to fund a 10% increase in the number of units installed per year in refugee camps.

Looking ahead, we aim to reach more than 300,000 people over the course of 5 years, providing that we can form partnerships with UNHCR, NGOs and big telecoms that wish to reach out with their services to larger refugee and rural off-grid communities.

Financial: 

• Starting capital ($36,000) is required for the installation of 12 more units within the next year.

• Funding is required to enable remote-access capabilities on the digital-hub, allow faster charging through USB 3.0, and measure phones charged through the addition of a current sensor.

• $10,000 is needed for the testing of various UV filtration solutions, ensuring goodness of fit with the scale of filtration we are performing, and the energy supplied by our solar system.

Technical: 

• Right combination of sediment filters and UV technology is required to improve water quality whilst reducing replacement costs.

• Various technologies to establish internet up-link within camps must also be tested to enable remote-access, the same applies to electrical load monitoring (number of charged phones).

• Solar modules for our light as a service model must be prototyped. 

Legal:

• Issuing IP and legal protection for our new lighting offerings co-developed with ENTEC S.A. 

• Obtaining an extension of camp permissions by drafting a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry for Development.

• Incorporating as a social enterprise and finding the most suitable legal entity to ensure legal protection for our operations in the humanitarian sector. 

Cultural:

• Gaining the trust of the local board of seniors within rural communities  and ensure the pricing of our services do not compromise the ability of other vendors to make a living.

• Provide tailored digital content (libraries of e-books/resources) according to the demographics of the camp (age, languages).

• Ensure adequate training for microentrepreneurs and the design of a ‘user manual’ answering queries. 

With regards to technical challenges, Entec S.A, an Athens based company with extensive experience in solar-energy and water services (filtration, desalination plants) in municipalities has agreed to extend their collaboration with us and help us improve and upgrade the Swapcy unit by retrofitting a UV filtration component. They will also help us prototype our  new solar lighting modules. The additional electronics upgrades for the Solar Hub will be carried out by informatics students at the University of Amsterdam. 

With regards to the financial needs of our venture, we are exploring a matched funding mechanism with other NGOs as well as planning a second crowd-funding campaign which will help us kick-start this scale up. 

Any legal and cultural complications are addressed by utilising our network of mentorship schemes offered by our universities (Imperial College London, University of Amsterdam) along with independent support received from our previous base, The University of Edinburgh, as well as our new partners MIT Solve. 

Through our partners, Andan foundation, the MIT and UNHCR we will be able to resolve any logistical, legislative and communication related issues in Bangladesh by identifying the right network of volunteers and NGOs to work with. These stakeholders along with the support of the government will be playing the role of our in-country team on the ground.

Our solution is targeted to off-grid communities. Addressing  refugee communities as a starting point, by serving the 2 largest camps in Bangladesh, can allow us to take new learning and local experience in further expanding our solar offerings and essential services such as access to clean water, lighting and educational e-resources to rural, agricultural communities,too. The market opportunity for the provision of clean water systems, and charging amenities through bespoke solar community infrastructure is vast. 

 Moreover, the rise of mobile phone penetration rates and the need for digital literacy opens up the floor for the provision of targeted content to the farming community amongst marginalised populations wishing to upskill and develop skills that promote climate adaptation/resilience. Through the piloting of micro-finance services, the integration of digital content as well as the reduction in operational costs, our devices have the potential to tap into the renewable energy goals set by the government while achieving socially desired outcomes. The added benefits of clean water and quality education provisioning, increase the addressable market share of the solution, while strengthening the attractiveness of the offering. To achieve organic growth, a scale up of 25 units installed every year for the next 3 years has the potential to impact the lives of thousands of people while empowering communities to take direct ownership of te devices, enabling them to become solar micro-entrepreneurs. 

3 current Elpis Solar staff

10 Elpis Solar staff alumni

1 contractor (ENTEC S.A.)

1 partnering organisation (Challenges Worldwide)

Our growing team differentiates itself by covering three key areas needed for the realisation of our projects. We merge expertise in technology, green finance and local knowledge of the problem at hand to develop effective solutions that have the user at the centre of our developments.

Samuel Kellerhals

Samuel aims to catalyse progress in the environmental sphere through his growing informatics toolkit. With a BSc in Environmental Sciences from the University of Edinburgh, and starting an MSc in Data Science at the University of Amsterdam this fall, his knowledge of web-development, data analytics, machine learning and internet of things makes him a key force behind the development of our digital services platform for refugees.

Alexandros Angelopoulos

Brings experience to the team in energy finance, ESG investing, carbon accounting and green & sustainable entrepreneurship through his postgraduate MSc in Climate Change, Finance and Management at Imperial College London. His most recent project being the introduction of solar powered street lighting systems and solar bus stops, in Kalamata district (Greece), where he led the procurement, pre-feasibility assessment and installation phases of the project, liaising with state officials. Alexandros has received college awards as the president of the Social Impact and Responsible Investing careers club, as well as has been recognised by Imperial College's Dean with ''The power of Innovative Thinking' award.

Our ability to put together resources, ideas and inspire people to join us, allows us to forge long term partnerships based on the values of transparency, shared vision and accountability. 

Entec S.A.: 

Provides solar-powered modules, technical and logistical support. As our closest working partner, Entec S.A provides these components and has over 30 years of experience in the Greek energy sector. This standing in-kind collaboration is vital to our success, as Entec S.A. is currently helping us design, prototype and optimise our products at cost and is responsible for the manufacturing and shipping of the units as well.

Challenges Worldwide

Challenges have been supporting Elpis to enter the African market through short-term work including, market assessments, business development, training and mentoring of local volunteers in liaison with UNHCR and state authorities in Rwanda.

Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts: 

Elpis Solar is an industrial partner of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Recently, Samuel Kellerhals supervised a bachelor thesis in an Industrial Engineering & Innovation course with the aim to develop a circular business model and conduct market research in Switzerland. The results of this thesis were published in June 2019, and are now leading to new product developments for Elpis Solar.

MIT Solve and Andan Foundation:

Provision of funding, mentorship support and links to volunteering organisations and NGOs for in-country support on the ground.

We operate a circular multi-sided business model that accelerates low-carbon development across borders.

Light as a service in MEDCs:

Its backbone is formed by selling solar street lighting modules in MEDCs. Our value proposition is to sell light as a service in the public sector by providing modular solar street lighting modules that can be installed on pre-existing street-light poles. This reduces capital costs, increases sustainability, and generates a recurring revenue stream for us. After termination of the use contract, solar street light modules will be returned to Elpis Solar, where they can be reused for other installations in MEDCs or installed within refugee camps, most of whom lack lighting facilities. These devices are enabled with IoT technology and provide usage statistics and insights from environmental sensors to our customers, including direct billing.  

Microentrepreneur model: Within refugee camps, we allow residents to become microentrepreneurs by operating our offgrid solar systems as solar charging businesses, with the addition of the sale of other potential services such as airtime. As our deployments in refugee camps grow, we aim to collect micropayments from these operators which will support operations and maintenance of our units in refugee camps. Digital CSR:

Finally our digital platform provides a direct way for organisations to interact with refugees and enhance their CSR portfolio. We will offer the opportunity for digital service providers to disseminate their content on our platform. Furthermore advertising opportunities will also be made available for selected organisations.

For the past 2 years during our initial ideation and prototyping stage we relied solely on philanthropy to fund our activities, however we now aim to validate our business models and become a financially sustainable venture.

After 6 months of empirical qualitative research in the Swiss market (municipalities, tourism board), we have identified a key opportunity in a niche market, selling access to solar street lighting as a service. This will constitute our primary revenue stream, which we will use to fund R&D and further installations of our solar systems in refugee camps. Our next steps are now targeted at developing a minimum viable product for the Swiss market, and following up with our leads to initiate a testing phase in the municipality of Wohlen in the canton of Aargau. This testing phase will inform product development and our route to market strategy, which ultimately will result in a recurring revenue stream for us.

Next, we seek to approach potential partners for our micro entrepreneurial model (e.g. Bangladeshi Telecoms), so that they can provide their products to sell alongside our stations. We will take a processing fee and after scaling up operations across more camps this will constitute another significant revenue stream to cover in-country maintenance and operations.

Finally, we also aim to approach organisations and companies that create digital content and services that could be consumed within refugee camps. Here we will also charge a premium for certain companies to be able to host their content/advertise on our platform.

We’re applying to Tiger Challenge to turn Elpis Solar into a fully financially sustainable social enterprise - where until now it has just been a project set-up by students. Primarily we seek to access the expertise and mentorship from the  Tiger IT Foundation to validate and build upon our current business models and solutions. 

We are at a crossroads where we know that our solutions work, and that there is a strong demand for them, however we still need to validate our business models and move towards a fully self sustainable entity. 

In order to do this we require funding to scale-up our micro entrepreneurial model  in Bangladesh and invest into developing a full-scale entrepreneurial training and monitoring programme in new camps. 

Furthermore we also seek to invest into R&D to make our units more useful to refugees, and thus increase the success of our solar entrepreneurs. One of these changes is integrating UV water filtration to not only rely on membrane filtration and thus reduce maintenance costs. Furthermore, we also need to integrate lockable compartments in our solar-units to increase security. 

Finally, we seek to integrate tailored educational resources and digital content into our digital platform and thus make it available to thousands without an internet connection. To do so we would require support in forging partnerships with other startups, digital content providers and potentially telecoms. Moreover, working with rural communities for the provision of sustainability advice would require the identification of local volunteers and NGOs on the ground. 

In order to help us scale our solutions by entering a new market in Bangladesh, we seek to enter a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bangladesh Foreign Ministry addressing Refugee related issues, as well as the relevant ministries providing green energy infrastructure to rural communities. Furthermore, a potential partnership with UNHCR has also been discussed. We envision to become a key partner of UNHCR to help them deliver critical essential services at the initial phase of refugee settlement formation. Discussions with UNHCR representatives (primarily in Rwanda) have also shown that they would see us as a potential primary distributor of information throughout refugee camps via our digital platform – as this is something they have struggled to find a solution to in the past.

Furthermore, we also want to partner with high-quality providers of educational content such as MIT through their OpenCourseWare database, as well as other providers of MOOCs such as Edx. A partnership as such would enable these organisations to directly impact the lives of millions were their content to be integrated into our digital platform and deployed in refugee camps. Other organisations in this space include Khan Academy, Coursera, YouTube and Kiwix, as well as regional digital literacy programme providers.

Additionally we would like to further diversify the offering of our solar mobile phone charging stations by allowing our microentrepreneurs to also sell airtime. This is made possible by partnering with telecoms, in particular in our case with BTCL, Airtel, Teletalk, Robi, GrameenPhone amongst others.