All men dream but not equally.
Those who dream by night
in the dusty recesses of their minds
wake in the day to find that it was vanity;
but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men,
for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.
-T.E. Lawrence
We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. ~Stacia Tauscher
Harnessing our best resources is what will help us save the earth- and those best resources are our kids, our own brains, our collective ability to be more than the sum of its parts.
It truly is overwhelming to see the amount of work that needs to be done and the constant onslaught of more pollution each and every day. Can we save ourselves? The only answer to that is “yes” for the alternative would mean we should just all give up. If there was ever a need for idealists, it would be now.
Even though the Philippines is a relatively poor country, it nevertheless has one of the most expensive electricity rates in the world, making it doubly hard for a micro-entrepreneur to sustain, much less, grow a business.
For example, even something as simple as having ice for fish so that it won’t spoil by the end of the day is either not available or too expensive, forcing fishermen to sell their catch at a lower price or preventing them from adding further value to their product (e.g.- making fish balls/cakes) for later consumption. By setting up and running a Solar Center that can produce cheap ice, fresh goods can travel further and have longer shelf lives.
But not everyone will know what to do so in order to make sure the energy generated is fully utilized, not just for consumption, but towards wealth creation, entrepreneurship training will be provided to the micro-entrepreneurs in terms of ideation, marketing, exporting, networking, etc.
This is only one example of how a Solar Center with photovoltaic cells set up to generate 1.4kw of energy per day can be used to create a large impact on a community. There are of course many other ways the electricity can be used for production such as lighting (the center itself), water purification, baking (all sorts of different goods), washing (machines) as a business and to free up labor for other production, charging batteries for other appliances (phones, radios, computers, etc.) that can be taken home or on the field where there may be no electricity or is costlier, etc.
Objectives:
(1) Reduce the costs of electricity for production so that products and services created by micro-entrepreneurs can become competitive
(2) Establish new products/service niches by micro-entrepreneurs
(3) Promote & educate large populations on the use of clean energy (nothing
beats seeing the real thing working)