 I'm normally told I have a small voice but I can't project my voice a lot. I hope everyone is hearing me. Everybody hear it? Yes. You've heard my names. I'm 27 years. I live in Nairobi Kenya, but I was born in western part of Kenya. That's where I was born and raised. I just want to thank the institutes for having me here. It's a great honor to be here. It's my first time in an island. I think I've come here with a nice weather from Nairobi. You should all be thankful for that. How many of you have been to Africa? Almost all of you. That's interesting. Most of the audience I interact with in many countries haven't been to Africa. So it's really good that most of you have traveled to Africa. So you get to understand much better some of these issues. Kenya is of course in the East African region of Africa. That's where I was born in a small village in a rural village which typically has no power. Where people live in grass-touched houses. The walls are made of mud. Most of the children in Africa, most of the developing countries in rural areas have to walk to school several miles away every day. That's what I went through. The school of course didn't have electricity also. So because of that, you find that when the children are given homework in school they can't do it when they go back home and because their parents can't afford kerosene. Their homes don't have electricity and their parents can't afford kerosene. And so when I was growing up we used to have co-propanchement in school. So you literally can. So a lot of the kids got frustrated because they haven't done their homework, they're punished in school. So a lot of them really dropped out of school. So I remember when I was in 5th grade we were about 100 students but only about 30% of us finished 8th grade. So that was really a big problem. But we were lucky in our home my parents could afford kerosene. So I was able to study well my siblings and I were able to study and I went on to high school and eventually to college. But I am just one of the few people who get a chance to go to college from the millions of people in rural areas in Africa. You find that the children who study in schools that have electricity mostly in urban areas they once you end up to get a good education they end up getting jobs or going into self employment and then really empowering their families. And then what happens is the gap between the gap in terms of poverty levels among people in urban areas and those in rural areas keeps on increasing because they once in rural areas don't get a chance to get a good education so they end up not really continuing with the same lifestyle of living in the rural area becoming decent farmers without really any measures of income. So that's really a problem. And just if you look at what happens is that these families they wake up in the morning they don't have really any money. What they have is the hope they have hope that at the end of the day they'll have food, they'll have kerosene they'll have their basic needs. That's all they live for every day. So during the day they have to struggle to work so they get about 2 euros in a day and this is a family of over 5 people they have to spend that on food, on kerosene on medication and all the basic needs. So you can imagine how that lack of access to a regular source of income affects their livelihoods. And kerosene really takes about 30% of the daily expenditure. So if a family is getting about 2 euros in a day and about 30% of that is going to kerosene alone it's a big burden for them. You can imagine what's the average daily income here in Ireland. Average daily income. That's what you have in India. So assuming an average daily income of about 100 euros you can imagine taking about 30 euros of that spending on your lighting energy needs only. You still have other needs there. So it's something that contributes a lot to poverty in the rural areas. And to put it in the larger perspective in Afrika we have, in subjara in Afrika we have over 550 million people who don't have access to electricity in subjara in Afrika alone. Around the world we have over 1.2 billion people who don't have access to electricity. So there are denied opportunities to run businesses till later tonight. They can't really store food in a refrigerator. They can't do anything really because of the limitation they have to access to power. So it's a huge global problem and a lot of people need to focus on. And what really drove me to do something about it is I used to see and to read to watch on television a lot of programs being run development programs being run to kind of lift people out of poverty in these areas. But in my own village I really didn't see anything changing for all the years I was there. In fact, life became harder for most people. So I used to ask myself where is the problem? What is not being done right? And so I wanted to create a simple solution that can be used locally that can be made in a very easy way and that can enable communities in rural areas in Africa to be able to enjoy a better lifestyle. And that's what made me to come up to develop a simple solar lamp when I was in my first year in college in 2004. So I just designed a simple solar lamp that is made from about 50% of cycle materials made from things like scrap metals and it's very, very easy to make. You don't need to go to college to make it really. It's where we right now in fact we are training young people who don't have formal education who drop out of school because of poverty issues we are training them to be able to make these lamps. So the essence was to make something that is simple and it can be easily replicated. And I just started by saving a little bit of my student loan every semester to make the lamps. I didn't have any kind of external support but I was determined just to make a small difference in my own community in my own village where I grew up in. So I just made a few lamps distributed to my grandmother in the village a few people there. Then my friends got encouraged they said they also want lamps to take back to their homes. So all of them started supporting what I was doing and it just continued to grow like that. More and more people wanted to see the lamps in their homes. Somebody was probably even maybe somebody was working somewhere. I'm just passing out around so people can look at the lamp on the front of it there so they have an idea as you talk about it there's a picture of one there. I'll just pass it around. As you can see it's a very simple technology a very simple solar lamp that we're making. So some of the people who are like working in the cities will visit maybe their village back home and they find this lamp being used by maybe they are part of their family there and they will ask where did you get this from and when they were told about me then they will contact us and they will support what you are doing and just by word of mouth everything just started growing. I didn't really intend to be doing this like full time. Or to make it a career. Was not your early CV. To really make it a career. I had gone into college to study engineering to go into probably telecommunications to one of the maybe multinational companies that was my initial dream. But this basically changed what I was doing. So it started growing and more and more there was more interest. Then as it grew I realized that lamps were able to solve part of the problems I was seeing. The children could be able to study in the homes we had provided lamps. The children could be able to study of course now they could improve their performance and eventually the transition into higher levels of education will increase and basically change a lot of things in that community. And families could now save the money that they could spend on kerosene. But the key thing was that really poverty was still there. You find the kids who are badaimuil in school they need to progress at higher levels. But then the parents can afford fees because they don't really have a regular income. So I asked myself how can I be able to use this lamp to create a sustainable socio-economic development mechanism that will lift these rural communities out of poverty. So that at the end of the day they have the lamps but still their social status has improved. So that was the key question I kept on asking myself. And that's why I believe innovation should be tied to the socio-economic benefits it brings to the society. So as we are sitting here today we need to ask ourselves how can really innovation help to spare socio-economic development. It can be anywhere in the world. And you know innovation not necessarily it's about coming up with a gadget or a product or something. Innovation can be in the way you think it can be in the way you come up with a different model of doing as a particular task. So how do you use that to be able to create development in wherever place you are. And in my few years really working in villages across in mostly in Kenya and of course I visited a couple of other countries in Africa. What I've realized is that the whole this kind of people who are looked upon as innovators we tend to untie ourselves to move away from the bigger issues that are faced with society. So we believe that we have a particularly innovation and that is it. But we don't tie it to how is it going to change people's lives. So that's something that happens a lot. So we find a case where a group of students studying at Harvard or Stanford come up with a certain innovation and then you think this innovation you are making it to give it to to help people in Africa. And yet they don't really understand the dynamics of the people who live there. They don't understand the culture. They don't understand the social status of the people. So there is that disconnect that is happening a lot. I was approached by one of the big Hollywood stars sometime back. He wanted to find a project where we could be able to distribute kukstobs in countries in Africa. And so the whole idea is good because a lot of people in these areas they still use firewood for cooking which is a problem because they are cutting down trees and all that. But then I asked him for somebody who lives in that rural setting somebody who is getting this small amount of money every day from hand to mouth that's all they have. They spend money on the very basic needs. They don't really have they don't want to spend on anything apart from food, apart from what they need for lighting and the very basic needs and medication. They walk down in their farm, cut down a branch, use it for cooking. So basically for them they are not spending any money on that. As much as all of us sitting here it's not a very cost effective way of getting energy for cooking because it has also a negative environmental impact. But for them it doesn't really matter. So I refuse that. And it's the same thing. We couldn't go into villages and start telling people the kerosene lamps you're using produce carbon which is bad for the environment. That's like singing a lullaby to them. It's really something that doesn't fit into the lifestyle. For them is how are you going to enable me to have more income to have more spending power? That's the most critical thing for them. And that's how a lot of innovation has been happening. I've worked into other villages where I've found people creating a water purification plant. Okay, it's a good. Of course when this water is not clean it causes some of the basic diseases like cholera, diarrhea and all that which is a problem especially for young kids. But then I asked again for these communities who go and fetch water in the river they don't spend any money on it. How are you going to convince them that now you need to buy water because it's purified, it's clean. As much as it's in the long run it is going to help them because they won't have to spend more money on healthcare. But still they just don't have that money at that particular time to spend on clean water. The same way they just can't afford to buy a cook stove as much as it may sound good and it's good because if they can get food for free why should they spend money on a cook stove? If they can get water for free from the river why should they spend money to buy clean water? So these are just some of the examples that I've looked at and observed that's happening where we've detached innovation from the creating solutions for the intended beneficiaries. And there's a lot of innovation also a lot of advancement in different sectors happening in different countries. What we look at as problems should be put into perspectives of the different perspectives of where we are. In a certain area you may find that when Google is developing a self-drive car it will be beneficial to some people but in a certain setting that is just something that is so useless to them. So that's how it is. And from my perspective in most of the developing countries innovation should focus on the key things that is energy, agriculture, education and healthcare. I believe those are the key sectors that can be able to just bring sustainable socio-economic development in countries that are trying to move into middle income economies or higher income economies. Of course development in ICT is critical but it should only be a supplement to those sectors. Unfortunately again what has been happening because of which is a good thing in a good thing in a certain way like what is happening for example in the social media. So if a young person in Kenya can say that Zookabab developed Facebook and created billions out of it. So it tends to have the effect of creating a mindset that entrepreneurship that really pays well should be focusing more into the ICT sector. But what people do understand is we live in different regions we have different needs. So it has been happening. So the focus has been a lot of people coming up with innovations in most of the developing countries right now are focusing more on the ICT which is good. But I think there must be a shift towards the more critical things that will move people up to a certain level where now they can enjoy even better the benefits that come with innovation in ICT. Because if somebody doesn't have access to energy basically they can't charge their mobile phone so if they can't charge their mobile phone they can't access Facebook or Twitter. So the critical things still remain to be agriculture, energy, education and healthcare and I believe that's what and more effort should be put into to enable people to improve their lives. And that is what I was looking at when I asked myself how can I use the lamp to be able to improve people's lives. And so I came up with a model a program I call Use Solar Save Lives. So under this what we do is that we set off by training young people who dropped out of school young people in formal education to make the solar lamps then we make these solar lamps in a very simple way using basic tools there are no specialized tool equipment that we use only the very basic tools that you can get anywhere. And after we make these solar lamps we are able to distribute them to women in the villages through women groups and of course there are reasons why working with women is much easier because those are obvious reasons that I believe a lot of you should be knowing but we don't deal with individual women but we deal with women in a group women groups then we train these women groups on aspects of basic business skills on micro entrepreneurship So once they get these solar lamps they start saving the little money that they were initially spending on kerosene they start saving that money every day they put into a group kitty so every day they are spending about probably about 30 cents or 20 cents per euro every day on kerosene so they put that in a basket in a group kitty then after a couple of months they use those savings to create an income generating project so which can again be anything mostly it's normally agricultural best because they're dealing with people who are in rural areas but we've seen it has transformed into just different types of economic ventures that they are setting up we've seen them even creating small village microfinance where they're able to start lending the money to to people who can afford government employees or the large farmers within the areas they are able to lend them the money and they pay with interest so it's really a mixture of different income generating project that these women are creating then once they do that they use that also as collateral to be able to access financing and to even set up new small businesses and that is really critical because everything that has started with the lamp it has created opportunities for young people to have an income it has created an opportunity for the women to have a business where they have a regular income and then it has created an opportunity also where of course the other benefits in terms of health in terms of reducing emission of carbon into an environment so now for the people who are at that level if you start telling them about the negative effects of kerosene to the environment they'll be able to agree with you and now you can come in and tell them ok you have more income now now cooking with foud is also bad for the environment now we need to move to start using cookstores so that's how we believe innovation should be used to spur socio-economic development and if you look at other examples that have been working we have other innovations we have an innovation called iCOW in Kenya where it's helping it's an SMS-based application that helps farmers, daily farmers to be able to know where they can access facilities like veterinary services they can be able to know the gestation period for the cows all those things associated with dairy farming they can access information through their mobile phone and such kind of innovation is helping not only the farmers to be able to improve on the quality of their farming but again it's also helping them to access markets for their products and that really results in more job creation it results in really improving the lifestyle of the people we have an innovation like in Ghana I call it MPDGRIF where people can be able to verify the authenticity of pharmaceuticals because again one of the courses because of liberalization of markets of course so a lot of bad pharmaceuticals come into communities account of it which again affects people some of them have negative effects some of them even cause death but a simple innovation can help someone to be able to verify setting all the way from the stores that stock these pharmaceuticals and the consumers themselves they can be able to verify wherever they are even in the villages as long as they have a phone they can be able to verify if the pharmaceuticals they bought are good or not and just by that simple verification it can be able to save lives so we have so many examples of how innovation is helping to bring about socio-economic benefits and if you look at all this at the end of the day what they do is is to be able to create more job opportunities is to be able to create more wealth for people is to be able to basically increase their spending power is to be able to mitigate negative effects of the climate is to be able to improve health to improve education all these are things that will really be able to move people from poverty levels to a level where they can afford to look at other luxuries in life if again look at another innovation like we have of course most of you have heard about M-Pesa which is an innovation mobile fund banking in Kenya but then an aspect of that that they recently launched is called M-Schwa where people can be able to make small savings into their phone so basically they are able to borrow money through their mobile phone and repay slowly with some interest this is something that is helping a lot of especially small businesses where they can be able to borrow they can be able to borrow little amounts of money whenever they want to stock their shops or do anything and again this is helping to grow to create opportunities for more and more people all these are innovations that again can be replicated in different environments they are not just innovations that are happening in Africa they are innovations that can be able to be replicated everywhere else in the world and it's more critical for Africa because we have a very very youthful population in Africa a very very youthful population like in Kenya about 60% of the population are people below the age of 25 so basically these are people who are dependents so it's a critical thing and an employment rate in Kenya is over 40% I know here probably it should be something about 13% and people are crying all over you can imagine if it gets to 40% on employment rate for a population that is majorly made up of young people it's a huge problem and that's how I have been involved more and more to be able to encourage especially young people to be able to start to create change wherever they are that's why as I'm saying it's not about creating a product or anything it's about just looking at everything that you do every day how can you do it differently and how is it going to create social good in your own environment in your own community and in your own society that's something that all of us can do and so out of the learning experience I've gained moving forward and moving into looking at what I've been doing to broaden it of course we want to expand to be able to have the program running in more countries not just in Africa but eventually in other continents also but I also want to be able to look at the experiences I've gained to develop something else so I'm looking at creating something I'm calling a virtual village town where I'll be able to use a combination of different renewable energy technologies like biomas biogas solar energy wind to be able to create a system where we can be able to we can be able to generate energy for cooking have energy for lighting have energy for other uses also have solar powered irrigation and then be able to purify water and be able to produce fertilizer all in a system and so that will be able to help look at the the very basic sectors that can be able to really transform a community at once to increase their income levels and apart from that I'm also soon I'll be launching a new version of the lamp that will be hopefully distributed in stores around the world where you can buy and have it in your garden or use it anywhere for camping and all that so that we can generate enough resources to be able to support the program we are running in the villages again that's something I'm looking at in the future and hopefully we'll keep engaging to move along with this journey Thank you