Let there be lighting

Published in 2007

For over 10 years Canadian photonics engineer Dave Irvine-Halliday has been travelling the world to light up thousands of homes in developing countries thanks to an effective, economical Solid State Lighting (SSL) system which uses whitelight- emitting diode (WLED) lamps. Winner of a Rolex Award in 2002, he is now using local production and microcredit to make this revolutionary technology more widely available.

When night falls on Tembisa, only the glimmer of candles and paraffin lamps lights up the shacks made from corrugated zinc, wood and plastic sheeting in this township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. In the 40 kilometres separating Tembisa from the city, electricity is available only to light up a few streetlamps, with frequent power cuts. In the darkness that cloaks the region at night, the shack belonging to Michael and Poulina Mohlala shines out like a beacon: every evening, two powerful lamps provide light that attracts many of their neighbours. According to Michael Mohlala, “it’s like a small miracle. Even when the whole of Tembisa is plunged into darkness, my lights are working.” Fitted with white-light-emitting diodes (WLEDs), the lamps are powered by a battery that is recharged daily by a solar panel, and thus require no conventional electricity supply.

Like the Mohlala family, thousands of people living in disadvantaged areas around the world now have a reliable source of household light thanks to this cutting-edge technology provided by Dave Irvine-Halliday. Since 1997, he has been revolutionising the techniques and economics of supplying lighting in developing countries through his foundation, Light Up The World (LUTW). He is convinced that WLEDs are a logical, effective solution to the lighting needs of thousands of poor, isolated communities: “Diodes can give hundreds of times more brightness than a kerosene lamp while using less than one 100th of the energy of an ordinary incandescent light-bulb,” he explains. “Also, they use batteries that can be recharged by solar, wind or hydro power – in other words, renewable, non-polluting forms of energy.”

Irvine-Halliday, a Scot by birth and education, leaves his teaching job at the University of Calgary in Canada for three or four months each year to travel to remote villages, with SSL systems in hand. “Bringing light to the developing world is no easy endeavour, since each region we work in has its own unique challenges, such as geographic isolation, declining infrastructure or scarcity of resources.” His determination to enable more and more families in the developing world to make the quantum leap from candles to diodes earned him a Rolex Award in 2002.

“The financial support from the Rolex Award made it possible for LUTW to spread Solid State Lighting in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka, and it also gave us instant international credibility in the eyes of those who had never heard of us before,” he explains. Thanks to LUTW, almost 20,000 households – representing over 100,000 individuals – in 43 countries in Asia, South America and Africa now have electric lighting in their dwellings. In southern India, in the state of Andra Pradesh, for example, LUTW has been working since 2004 with the non-govern mental organisation (NGO) Ankuram Sangamam Poram providing lighting for a village of 110 houses inhabited by 700 Dalits – a particularly disadvantaged group once known as “untouchables”. Further west, in the area around Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, lighting from the WLED lamps installed by LUTW has improved living conditions for about 100 crafts-women who embroider cloth at home.

“They’re not straining their eyes working on very small stitches any more,” Irvine-Halliday says. And even further away, in the Chirripo region in the heart of Costa Rica, LUTW has installed lamps in 135 households, enabling 675 farmers to have safe, reliable lighting in their homes for the very first time.

For Irvine-Halliday, however, these successes are only the tip of the iceberg. “I was rapidly confronted by the magnitude of the challenge that we faced,” he says. “Almost a third of humanity – 1.6 billion people – has no access to safe, healthy and affordable lighting, therefore it was essential that I find a way for SSL to spread on a much larger scale.”

To do so Irvine-Halliday had to overcome the main obstacles to mass distribution: production costs and import expenses. A lighting system typically consists of a 5-watt solar panel, a 12 volt-7 amp/hour maintenance-free lead acid battery, and two WLED lamps, and costs almost US$100 if manufactured in Canada – far too much for people with little income at the base of the pyramid. The Rolex Laureate found that he could lower the price by decentralising production of the lamps. While the actual diodes are made in the United States or Japan – “they require a highly specialised infrastructure,” he explains – the lamps themselves can be assembled far more cheaply in factories in developing countries. When the reduction in import costs is factored in, their purchase price can be reduced very significantly.

In Kathmandu, in 2000, Irvine-Halliday and his wife, Jenny, set up a company called Pico Power Nepal (PPN) to produce SSL systems locally. Since then PPN, which was handed over completely to a local entrepreneur in 2000, has made almost 6,000 WLED lamps and has sold them cheaply. The profits have been reinvested in supply diversification and the development of new products appropriate to the needs of Nepalese people, such as lamps of different sizes, a system for recharging batteries using solar power, and rotating solar photovoltaic systems that follow the sun.

While it is faithful to its strong humanitarian principles, PPN is nonetheless a commercial business – a necessary strategy, according to Irvine-Halliday. “Implementing a market model has been a fundamental part of LUTW’s visionary concept from day one, and as such a primary objective. There’s a fair profit to be made for the people who manufacture this kind of lighting system. But this is not a question of sheer greed: this is about reaching sustainability. If you don’t make a profit, you simply don’t stay in business – which is not good, either for the manufacturers nor, indeed, for the people who need these systems to light up their homes.” LUTW also went to Sri Lanka to develop the local production of lamps – right after the tsunami hit the island in December 2004. At the request of a major Sri Lankan NGO, Sarvodaya, in January 2005 LUTW distributed 1,000 SSL systems in the south and east of the country to light up the shelters occupied by refugees who had been forced to abandon homes destroyed by the tsunami – “a world first!” says Irvine-Halliday. To meet the pressing needs of the local people, LUTW collaborated with a small company in Colombo, Crystal Electronics, which took on the job of manufacturing the lamps following design instructions supplied by Irvine-Halliday. At the end of 2005, and in partnership with a major charitable organisation, more than 2,000 SSL systems were distributed to 10,000 refugees, and production continues to this day. “Providing a reliable source of lighting for communities who find themselves in such a terrible situation does a lot to improve their physical, psychological and spiritual conditions,” says Irvine-Halliday.

Another priority for LUTW is Africa. While the foundation is already active in isolated projects in Ghana and Central Africa – benefiting a total of 30,000 people – there is enormous potential for affordable SSL systems on a continent where electrical domestic lighting is still far from widespread. For the Rolex Laureate, South Africa represents an excellent launching-pad. “I truly believe that South Africa is the key to Africa and when it embraces SSL in a big way, then the rest of the continent will follow.”

Since 2005, he has been collaborating closely with a number of South-African companies to investigate the optimum conditions necessary for introducing SSL. The goal is to have the first SSL systems manufactured in Johannesburg before the end of 2007.

“In the shops you read on certain products: ‘Proudly made in South Africa’,” says Irvine- Halliday. “And I would love to put that on our lighting systems.” He believes that South Africa is also an excellent place in which to introduce second way of facilitating the distribution of SSL systems, via microcredit. By allowing people to take out loans for amounts that are to date too small to interest traditional banks, microcredit makes it possible for them to undertake small-scale economic initiatives – such as buying a lighting system. According to a study conducted by Evan Mills, a researcher at the Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and published in Science magazine in May 2006, the planet’s poorest people spend an average of $77 a year on candles or kerosene for lighting. Irvine-Halliday says: “We have been stating from day one that if the poor would use their kerosene funds to buy SSL systems, they can pay off all their lighting in around one year. Once they have paid, the lighting becomes virtually free in the following years, apart from the cost of replacing batteries, which amounts to about $10 every three to five years. And the WLED lamps and solar panels will last for decades. The worldwide positive economic ramifications of hundreds of millions of families having their annual kerosene funds available to spend on whatever they wish are immense, and there is also a very significant reduction in global CO2 emissions, thus helping with climate change.”

Eight households in Tembisa, Johannesburg, now have microcredit, and two of them have already paid off their loans in full. Irvine-Halliday firmly believes that spreading the microcredit system could make SSL systems truly universal. “Up to now we’ve mainly collected donations so we can install SSL systems free of charge. But in this manner we will barely scratch the surface of lighting needs in the long term, since we’ll never be able to collect enough money to give lighting to everyone who needs it. So we have to provide people the means of financing their lighting themselves.” He adds: “It’s the only realistic way to have an impact on the majority of those who are still living in darkness as soon as night falls.”

In Tembisa, Michael and Poulina Mohlala have seen for themselves how rapidly the work done by LUTW can change people’s lives. With the money they are putting aside thanks to their SSL system, they hope to be able to leave the shantytown, their home for 10 years, and find better housing.

“These lights have brought joy, happiness and hope to my house,” says Michael Mohlala.

Francesco Raeli

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