The "energy poor" spend a disproportionate amount of time and money (10-30% of household income) on sub-standard cooking and lighting fuels. This has enormous consequences for society. A community without electricity cannot run computing services, refrigerate medicines, power industrial machinery, or access information from the internet.

In 2009, I visited the Laikipia Plateau of North Central Kenya while conducting research on a solar-powered vaccine transportation system. Here, we lived with a rural community of ~50 households and decided to conduct a small site assessment. We learned that residents were MRC staff members who were housed on-site with their immediate families. This made the community unique in that at least one household member had a predictable source of income.

Nevertheless, the village was still 1 hour (by car) from the nearest town. Clean drinking water was available through boreholes and purified rainwater collection. Moderate electricity was provided at the research center through generators, but unavailable in the accommodation villages. In other words, these residents still faced the same fundamental resource challenges of any remote community.

Because the MRC had strong partnership with our university, we concluded that this was an ideal location for conducting a research study on solar technology in rural off-grid communities. Moreover, we could potentially use the administrative support to experiment with novel financing schemes.