The CSI story: IEEE PES Community Solutions Initiative

Abstract

The IEEE PES Community Solutions Initiative is dedicated to helping IEEE reach the Humanitarian Technology Challenge (HTC) -United Nations (UN) goal of achieving a major impact in global poverty reduction of which energy poverty is a major factor. The CSI vision emulates the goals of many like-minded groups of building bottom-up community prosperity through training and empowering local entrepreneurs to manage profitable businesses capable of growing to serve a million people in the first 5 years of operation. A successful business and technology model has been demonstrated at a seed funding level in Haiti and now is striving to attract further investment from both aid agencies and Social investment venture capitalists to expand marketing and production to full scale. The first initiative in Haiti is now three years old and new initiatives in Nigeria, Cameroon and South Sudan started in July 2012. In addition, CSI with a growing list of partners is dedicated to leveraging basic electricity to support a variety of uses including interconnectivity and interactive web-based affordable education at many levels in off-grid areas. Further incubation of technology, business and education models is also being pursued in collaboration with sustainable development NGOs committed to enabling the 1.4 billion at the economic Base of the Pyramid (BOP).