New organization Solar Sister is empowering women in rural Africa to star their own solar lamp businesses. Photo: IvanClow (flickr)

A new organization seeks to light up the night in rural Africa by putting a twist on an all-American idea: the Avon lady.

Night in rural Africa is a night much darker than that to which the developed world is accustomed, as many communities lack electricity. In rural Uganda, the number is as high as 95 percent, as Katherine Lucey told Dowser.org. Without electric light, people must rely upon kerosene lamps, which are expensive and belch toxic fumes.

These create a bevy of problems, especially for women. Girls are often expected to help with chores when they return home from school and don’t have time to do homework until after dark. Either they sit inhaling fumes and burning up cash with the family’s kerosene lamp, or in many cases, they simply don’t study at all. Solar lamps solve this problem by extending the work day.

For years, Africans have had a big problem with solar power: it breaks. In an interview with Dowser.org, Solar Sister founder, Katherine Lucey, said that in her previous work with a nonprofit, the solar systems they installed in rural areas had a 50 percent rate of failure after just one year. Traditional solar power can be a hard sell for poor communities — it saves money in the long run, but it's pricey at first, and many solar panels often fall apart over time due to improper maintenance. The new lamps that Solar Sister uses are small, portable, and don’t require technological know-how to use — you simply place the lamp outside during the day, it absorbs the sun’s rays, and when night falls you turn it on.

Solar Sister uses a microconsignment model, meaning that its entrepreneurs don’t pay for their lamps until they actually sell them. If they can’t sell the lamps or decide they don’t want to, they can return them to the organization without loosing any money. It’s a low-risk endeavor that has so far empowered 107 women in Uganda, Ghana, and Sudan. Normally, these women wouldn’t have had enough money to create a business.

The lamps range from $15 to $50 at first, a large investment for most families. But, an average family spends about $2 a week on kerosene, so a family could save up to $85 a year just by buying a lamp, says TriplePundit. Solar Sister estimates that its entrepreneurs can actually double their households’ incomes while decreasing their household expenses by 30 percent. Some of the lamps can even act as cell-phone chargers. Not only can women with these lamps charge their own family’s phones; they often bring in extra money by charging neighbors’ phones. Otherwise, they’re left to travel to nearby cities whenever a phone goes dead.

The women who participate in Solar Sister can seem pretty ecstatic about their new businesses, as you can see in this clip below of Viola, one of the women selling solar lamps in eastern Uganda.

Solar Sister currently operates in Uganda, Rwanda, and South Sudan, and hopes to shine a light on other parts of Africa soon.

Glasses were one of the first products to use microconsignment, which required training on reading eye charts and providing eye care. Photo:GoRun26 (flickr)

Chances are you're pretty familiar with microfinance. But have you ever heard of microconsignment? Microconsignment is similar to microfinance in a lot of ways, but with a unique twist. Basically, instead of giving an entrepreneur a loan to be repaid over an agreed upon period of time, the aim of microconsignment is to give access to a good or service to a community that is without.

For example, in a community where the nearest doctor might be a days drive away, a microconsignment group might work with an entrepreneur to open a shop where people can get their eyes tested and buy prescription eyeglasses. The entrepreneur gets training on how to do an eye exam and run a business, as well as the materials they need to open up shop and market their business. Only after the products sell, the entrepreneur pays back the initial cost using a percentage of his or her profits. Another key difference with traditional microfinance models is that much of the risk stays with the lender.

Greg Van Kirk first tried the microconsignment model in his days as a Peace Corps volunteer. He saw an opportunity, and decided to found Soluciones Comunitarias, a microconsignment institute operating in rural South America. The New York Times' wrote about the microcosignment pioneer in a recent post on their Fixes blog.

Yolanda Garcia was one of the first entrepreneurs to work with Soluciones Comunitarias, introducing glasses into her community in rural Guatemala. She admitted to the New York Times that her first attempts at selling were not hugely successful. Had she taken out a loan to buy the glasses that didn’t sell, Garcia may have had to take out more loans just to pay the first back. “Why put all that risk on somebody up front?” Malini Krishna, the vice president of development for Soluciones Comunitarias explained to The Times. “Why not help them put the glasses out there and then get repaid when glasses sell?”

Since product doesn’t always sell, business can be slow for the five year old company. However, Soluciones is already turning a sustainable profit. According to Tina Rosenberg, a New York Times contributor on social issues and solutions, it took Grameen Bank -- one of the founding microcredit institutions -- 18 years to reach the same point.

And Soluciones does something else right; it trains its employees well. Garcia, along with some of the other early entrepreneurs, is now a co-owner and operator of the company and trains new employees to become social entrepreneurs in their own communities.

The consignment model made all the difference for Garcia, who has gone from a housewife with a primary school education to a co-owner of a successful company. “If I had had to take out a loan I wouldn’t have done it,” Garcia said, “I always felt I wanted to do something, but we didn’t have the economic resources beyond what we needed for the day.”