S3IDF: Empowering Lives through New Lights

With its headquarters in Cambridge, MA, USA, and the regional chapter in Bangalore, the Small-Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund, Inc (S3IDF) is an NGO that has succeeded in establishing a connect between poor communities, renewable energy providers, and local banks in southern India. The NGO has carried out 35 cost effective renewable lighting projects for urban and rural communities that have benefited nearly 5,500 people.

“Access to reliable infrastructure services like energy, water, transportation and Information Communication Technology (ICT) play an important part in poverty alleviation. S3IDF creates enterprises to provide sustainable infrastructure services to the poor via technological, business development and financial linkages, and implementing solar energy projects across various villages is focus area of our activities,” says  CFO/Acting CEO Vipula Sharma.

The S3IDF Lighting Initiative has been able to link modern energy supply chains and unconnected poor communities, worked out financing possibilities and enabled them to access infrastructural know-how. This has helped in lifting up the life standards of poor households and small rural enterprises. Earlier the communities were spending quite a substantial part of their earning on polluting energy sources such as firewood, candles, batteries and kerosene. But now with the intervention of the NGO, they have realised the importance of renewable energy.

S3IDF is working towards setting up 50 more lighting projects in a bid to help nearly 1,500 to 3,000 families. The NGO is also providing transaction expertise, targeting some 5,000 to 10,000 households through more than 100 additional projects.

Lighting plays a vital role in improving the quality of life of people (hawkers, weavers, beedi industry workers etc) and also in income generating activities. S3IDF has set up 34 small investment lighting projects for urban as well as rural poor that include households, communities and small enterprises. The projects have been able to serve about 6,000 people by generating employment opportunities and shooting up the income graph due to increased working hours and the lighting initiative has the evident health and safety benefits and is environmentally responsible.

Article by Sharon Huda and published in the Solar Energy Review - http://serindiaonline.com