 Hello, everyone. It is 11 a.m. Eastern Center here in New York, so we're going to kick off. I'd like to wish you all a good morning or good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. And welcome you to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2013 webinar series. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Lighting Global, and our guest presenters are Arne Jacobson and Peter Allstone. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'll be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not doing this, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where I'm a senior program manager. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, Lighting Global's support of clean energy markets for the rural poor. Energy is a key focus area at E4C, and we're always seeking to share insights and developments shaping the market. To do so, we've invited today's presenters, Arne Jacobson, who is the Quality Assurance Team Lead for Lighting Global, and the Director of the Shops Energy Research Center at Hubble State University, and Peter Allstone, the Quality Assurance Technical Specialist at Lighting Global, and PhD candidate in the Energy and Researches Group at UC Berkeley. Gentlemen, we thank you both for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series, generally. Along with myself, we have Holly Schneider-Brown and Alex Torres of Archipelage, as well as Victoria Chung, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody along the series today has questions or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we get going with our presenters today, we thought it would be a great idea to remind you about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a global community of now over 15,500 technically-minded members and more than 30,000 social media followers, such as engineers, psychologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists who work together to solve critical humanitarian challenges, whether in water, energy, health, agriculture, sanitation, or other areas faced by underserved communities around the world today. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides calls for the access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies such as ASME, IEEE, ASCE, SWE, and ASHRAE, as well as academic supporters like MIT's ULAB, and international development agencies such as USAID, EWBUSA, and Practical Action. Furthermore, you have an access to a passionate and engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and sign up. The webinar you are participating in today is one installment of the E4C webinar series. This free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field who bring new technology and solutions to bear on global humanitarian development challenges. Information on upcoming installments in the series as well as archive videos of past presentations can be found on the E4C webinar's webpage. You see the URL here. If you are on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join us in the conversation by using the hashtag E4C webinars. The next webinar will be on Tuesday, November 19 at 11 a.m. Eastern Center Time on the topic of building and running community cellular networks with open BTS. Our presenter will be Curtis Hyrule, who is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. We seem to be giving UC Berkeley a lot of love today. To learn more and register, please visit the E4C webinar page in about 24 hours when we will have the link up for registration. So a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's see where everyone is from today. In the chat window that is located on the right, please type your location. I'll give everybody an example here by typing out my location. There we go. That's some folks already letting us know where they're from. See some folks from the United States, Boston. Oh, we got some folks from India, Brooklyn, Houston, all over on the map over here. Very cool. Oh, a number of participants from India today. And of course, Hawaii and Greece. Very cool stuff. So any technical questions or administrative problems should go in this very same chat window. You can also feel free to send a private chat to Holly or Yana, myself. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks you may have. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window, which is located immediately below the chat window, to type in your questions for the presenter. This will allow us to keep track of all the questions as they're coming in and make sure that they're now lost or pushed down. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. If that doesn't work, you can use the calling number for the teleconference. You may also want to try opening WebEx up in a different browser sometimes that works that out. Following the webinar to request a certificate of completion, showing one professional development hour for those of you who are tracking those or your professional licenses, please provide your full name and the date that you completed this webinar as well as the code that we will provide at the end of this session. Compile that all on an e-mail and send it to e-a-d-c-e-u-admin at IEEE.org. And we'll repeat this information again at the end. So thank you everybody for entering your information about where you're from. It's great to have you all join us from all over the world. I'd like to introduce today's presenters to you all. First we have Dr. Arnie Jacobson, who as I mentioned is the director of the SHAP Energy Research Center, and then associate professor in the Environmental Resources Engineering Department at Humboldt State University. He serves as the technical lead for Off-Grid Lighting Part of Quality Assurance for the World Bank Group's Lighting Global Initiative, which is associated with the Lighting Africa and Lighting Asia programs. He has a PhD from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, a master's degree focused on environmental resources engineering from Humboldt State, and a bachelor's degree in physics for a long college. His area is of research and work interested in renewable energy technologies, energy access in off-grid areas, and clean energy deployment policy. Arnie's work is interdisciplinary in combined renewable energy engineering, energy policy, and social geography based approach to international development studies. He has extensive experience worldwide. Joining him today is Peter Alstone, who is a consultant on clean energy systems and a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Energy Resources Group. He is a co-member of the Lighting Global Quality Assurance team, which supports the market for modern off-grid lighting in the developing world. Peter's work for lighting global includes technical and engineering support, policy development, and market intelligence. His research focus areas include information technology approaches to clean energy development, understanding markets for demand side energy technology, and integrate energy policy. Peter has degrees in chemical engineering and environmental systems. So I'd like to welcome both of you tremendous gentlemen here to share with us some of your insights and hand over the presentation. Thank you, Iona. So I'll be getting started today, and I'll give some background on the market for off-grid lighting. And then I'll pass over to Arnie, who will talk about our work through Lighting Global to support that market. And so as a bit of contact, I want to remind everybody of last summer there was a big blackout in India. 600 million people were without power for two days. And that really reflects how tenuous grid access can be in the developing world. And that was front-page news in a lot of newspapers, and we heard about it a lot. What you don't hear about every day is that there's a permanent blackout for about 1.4 billion people on the planet. And those are people who don't have access even to that tenuous grid that may or may not be available. And so this is the broader context of people without access to the grid, people with access to the grid, and it may or may not be reliable. And when there's a blackout, whether it's permanent or whether it is just something that happens every once in a while, people turn to fuel-based lighting. That's the incumbent technology. And that's what lighting was before electricity and still is for people who don't have it. Fuel-based lighting is expensive, unhealthy, and inefficient. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. And here are some photos that just show the range of how fuel-based lighting works in the developing world. People on the left, there are kerosene sellers in every town who sell kerosene. People use a variety of different kinds of lamps to light their homes. I should say kerosene is not the only fuel that gets used. People also use diesel fuel and candles. There are some other stranger or what seem like stranger fuels like pitch wood, or we've even heard of people burning tires and sandals in very extreme situations. But in any case, kerosene is a major fuel here. It's about a $25 billion per year industry globally. So it costs a lot of money for people who don't have access to electricity to provide the light that they need. And what we're here to talk about today is the promise of modern off-grid lighting. Now, LED-based lamps, so that's light-emitting diode technology, those are emerging as an affordable substitute for fuel-based lighting for low-income people. LEDs are a technology that's been progressing very rapidly, and it's only been in the last five years that they've been cost competitive in terms of having high enough performance and low enough cost to really be a viable substitute. And we're really seeing the market take off in response to that. I want to highlight that these LED lighting products are not a substitute for grid power, but the reality is that a lot of people are not going to have access to the grid for the foreseeable future. So these can be a technology that bridges that gap. They're an affordable form of pre-electrification. It's better than fuel-based lighting, not as good as the connection to the grid. And also the quality of the products is quite mixed that are entering the market with market spoiling occurring. So market spoiling meaning that if somebody tries out a poor quality product and has a bad experience, they're much less likely to try out a product that may be better quality and may actually meet their needs quite well. And focusing on avoiding market spoiling is one of the core goals of lighting global. As I mentioned, there are 1.4 billion people who currently lack access to grid electricity. And that's a large potential market for these products. And there are a lot of people entering this market for a lot of firms. 96% of all the people without access to electricity are in Africa and Asia. And I should highlight that the trend looking forward is that most of the people who are going to be off the grid in the next 10 to 20 years are going to be in Africa. The pace of electrification and grid extension in Asia is much faster. And in Africa, actually, the projection is that more people will be off the grid in 20 years than are today. And that's because population growth is outpacing electrification on the continent of Africa. These people are also not rich. That goes along with not having electric power that's correlated. And they can't afford very high-cost alternatives to grid electricity. So these relatively small solar and LED-off-grid lighting products are affordable to people, and they can provide good-quality lighting. So the photo below shows a woman using an off-grid light to cook. So that's just one example of, you can imagine, there's a very wide range of applications that people need to use lighting for, cooking, studying, socializing, and these products attempt to meet those needs. And for people who do switch from kerosene to modern off-grid lighting, there are a range of benefits. First, in many people's minds, it is economic. These have a relatively fast payback period for buyers. When you compare the amount that people spend on kerosene that they no longer have to spend to the cost of one of these products, the cost range for these products is anywhere from 10 to 100 or more dollars. And there's a range of performance that goes along with those costs. But you see a fast payback on the order of months, so maybe six months. Of course, it completely depends on the context and which product they purchase. On a macro scale, when people in a country adopt off-grid lighting, if that country is an oil importer, that means that more cash is staying in the country. So that if you draw a boundary around the country, as we do, less cash is leaving that country to purchase oil or distilled oil products like kerosene. And more cash is staying in the economy of that country after the payback, which is relatively fast as occurred. Beyond economic benefits, there are very important health and safety benefits. Reduced fire and fuel ingestion risk is a big one, along with reduced exposure to particulate matter. So the fire and fuel ingestion are very acute health and safety risks. And our colleague Evan Mills at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab released a report that really dramatically documents how big these fire and fuel ingestion risks are. It's on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of people who are impacted by fires from fuel-based lighting every year. And the reduced exposure to particulate matter is also quite important. It's more intuitive in some ways. Just people who are exposed to the smoke have chronic disease issues, cardiopulmonary disease. Service quality is also better for off-grid lighting. There's better lighting than kerosene or other fuels. It's directional. It's easy to turn on and off. You can carry it around. And also there are added non-lighting services that are provided by a lot of these products. So 70% of the people in the developing world have access to a mobile phone today. And many of these products can charge those mobile phones. So what that means is there are a lot of people who don't have access to electricity who have a mobile phone. Right now they have to find ways of charging that phone that don't involve their house of electricity, which isn't there. These products enable them to charge a mobile phone more conveniently. And finally, there are important environmental benefits in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions from switching from fuel-based light to LED lighting. And I want to highlight some of those environmental benefits here. This is research that was completed last year by Nick Lamb, who is also here at Berkeley, and his colleagues. And it focuses on an estimate of the black carbon impacts of fuel-based lighting. And they're very focused on the type of lamp that's pictured here, which is a WIC lamp. It may be hard to see, but this is a lamp that's actually constructed out of an old tin can. So these are repurposed, recycled, you could say, lamps. But there's a reservoir of kerosene and an open WIC flame that produces quite a bit of soot. And that soot is also a powerful greenhouse gas, we call it black carbon. The map here shows the effective warming potential that Nick and his colleague estimate is induced by these kinds of WIC lamps with the black carbon. And it's substantial warming. So the warming effect from these WIC lamps is equivalent to 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the next 20 years. And black carbon, as a greenhouse gas, is something with a very short-lived lifespan, atmospherically. So that means that the warming is regionally focused in the areas where it's emitted. Black carbon is literally black particles that absorb sunlight and fall relatively quickly out of the atmosphere. So eliminating fuel-based lighting would be equivalent to approximately eliminating 5% of the total U.S. emissions. And that's a very large emissions reduction in the context of thinking about addressing climate change. That means there's a big win-win potential here for major greenhouse gas reductions while also improving energy access with a technology that's currently available and cost-competitive economically viable. So making sure that this happens, it requires market support. So expanding this market to meet the broad needs of the billion-plus people who could adopt better technology requires programmatic support to address the kinds of barriers that Arnie will talk about and that I've mentioned. But subsidies don't appear to be necessary. These are, as they stand, economically viable products for people. Those were the global impacts. I want to just also remind people that there are very local, very personal impacts to better quality lighting. The picture here is a young man who Arnie and I met in rural Kenya who operates a night market stand. And he sold fruit and juices, cigarettes, a range of kind of fast-moving products out of a night market stand. And after he adopted a modern off-grid light, you can see in the pictures that the quality of the lighting in a stand improved. He says that I stay open longer now more than before or now than before. I've noticed more customers are attracted to my business in the evening compared to before and they can see the goods more clearly. More customers means more sales and more money for me. And some people come far out of the way to see this lamp because it's very novel. This was the early days of the off-grid lighting market when not a lot of people had seen LED lighting. I think that the novelty factor is probably wearing off in Kenya because the market is really taking off. But that lighting quality factor is still there. This was research that we did along with Evan Mills through the Lumina project and the website is here. So there's a question just popped up about whether there's a source of good unbiased assessment of solar and LED product quality and efficiency. Yes, there is and we'll be telling you about it. So for the range of products that are entering the market, it's LED cost and performance trends that have really driven the availability of good performance, good quality, affordable products. It's translated to big cost savings compared to kerosene or other alternative light sources like compact fluorescent bulbs. So this is a plot that shows the relatively sort of global trend in LED package efficacy and price. So for people who aren't lighting people, efficacy is sort of like the efficiency of an LED at converting electrical power to radiative power in terms of lighting. So light is measured in lumens, electricity is measured in watts, efficacy is lumens per watt. So that's the x-axis of this graph. The y-axis is the price in terms of dollars per kilo lumen. And so both the price of LED packages, so those are the chips that emit light and also the price has been decreasing, the performance has been increasing. Just since 2010, here we are in 2013, the combined price and performance trends has resulted in a 300% gain in terms of affordability, price per dollar or sorry, price per performance. So it's very dramatic changes. And the way those have played out in solar lighting and for LED lighting are shown here. So on this graph, we're comparing a CFL type light. So this is the venerable CFL solar lantern that's been part of Energy Access programs for decades. We're comparing that to what you could do in 2009 with an LED light and what you can do in 2012. And you can see that we're including not only the light source but also what is the cost for the battery and the solar module and the balance of system to support lighting. So the size of the battery and the solar module are going to be related to how much power it requires for a light. So this is for lighting systems that provide uniform performance, so 120 lumens for four hours a day. We would expect that the total cost of a CFL-based product to meet that level of performance is about $65. In 2009, an LED equivalent product would have been over $80. Last year, it's more like $30 or a little bit less than $30. We haven't redone the figures for this year, but it's probably approaching 20. So the increase in efficacy, which is shown as going from 40 to 100 lumens per watt, along with declining costs for the LED chip, has really driven the cost of these products down and has opened up the marketplace and given people a lot of options that just weren't available three or four years ago. So they're diverse products that are entering the market. A lot of different firms are trying different things in terms of form factor, power levels, price. And Arnie is going to talk about our support for this really fast-moving and emerging market for awkward lighting. So I'm passing to Arnie now. Thank you, Peter, and thanks to everyone for joining and to Energy for Change for hosting. So as Peter said, I'm going to spend some time talking about the specific program or a set of programs that we're working with. These are a family of programs that are designed to support the development of markets for these products. This work originally started with the Lighting Africa program, this market support work. The Lighting Africa program, which is a joint international finance corporation, World Bank initiative. And it started off as a program that was aimed at transforming the market for LED-based awkward lighting products. And the framework of the program was designed not to subsidize the products themselves, but to instead analyze the market, look at where there were barriers to development of the market, and to focus on program activities aimed at trying to overcome those barriers and to enable the market to develop and grow. So five key elements of that program were quality assurance activities, activities related to increasing consumer awareness, activities associated with enabling increased access to finance for the companies that were manufacturing these products as well as distributors who were trying to sell them and consumers who might want to buy these through some sort of a microfinance loan. There were activities associated with increasing information to market actors, so market research reports that would help companies make decisions about how to guide their business, and then also a set of activities focused on policy and regulatory reform at the government level. So involved doing analysis and engaging with governments around things like reducing tax and tariffs on these sorts of products and other similar measures. The work that Peter and I have been focused on is in the quality assurance area, but that's just one of these five areas that were coordinated across the original design of the program. And there have since been some additional activities that have come up in the course of the program including sustainability, which focuses on trying to understand the end of life issues and how to manage disposal and recycling dimensions of the use of these products. The program has grown over time and it now involves collaboration between the International Finance Corporation, World Bank, and U.S. Department of Energy. Lighting India, excuse me, Lighting Asia was launched in 2012. Activities began in India in 2011. Currently there are activities in India, but there are several other Asia programs that are in the process of development in other Asian countries. And with the launch of the Asia activities, a separate set of activities under the name Lighting Global were set up in order to support both Asia and the Africa activities on things that were common to both such as quality assurance. So I'll spend a few minutes talking about the Lighting Global Quality Assurance Program. As I said, this is a joint IFC World Bank initiative and it supports both the Lighting Africa and the Lighting Asia programs. At the core of the program is a testing and verification program for LED-based off-grid lighting products, most of which are charged with solar power, although other charging sources are also possible and sometimes used. And the quality assurance framework that we originally developed under Lighting Africa and that became the Lighting Global Quality Assurance Framework was recently institutionalized through the International Electro-Technical Commission, which is the primary international standards body for electrical appliances. In the context of the Lighting Global program, we work with actors across the supply chain, everything from the manufacturer to the people in the distribution chain, governments who play a regulatory role in the space or have the potential to down to consumers and also financial institutions that provide loans or other financial services to others across the supply chain. And in the context of a market supply chain, actors all across that supply chain need information in order to make good decisions about buying and selling or otherwise playing a support role. And one of the things that they care most about is the product that they're considering buying or selling or financing a good quality product. And so the Lighting Global Quality Assurance Framework is aimed at trying to provide information about quality for those actors. Just some highlights of the program, dating back over the last four years, we now have two test methods that are actively in use and adopted by the IEC. We have a network of four active test laboratories and several more that are in development and we expect this to grow further over the next couple of years to date. Over 100 programs have been submitted by manufacturers on a paid basis for being tested under the program and just over half of those products have met the minimum quality standards that we've set for the program. So quite a few of the products, of course, have not met those requirements. Of those that have met the requirements in the Africa market, over 2.7 million products have been sold and sales growth for the quality-assured products is extremely high. We're seeing greater than 100% annual growth, so doubling in sales on an annual basis. Sales in Asia are also quite significant. Our data aren't quite as good in Asia. We haven't been tracking for nearly as long as in the Africa context, but are beginning to do that tracking now. So this is a program that has a fair bit of history at this point, a fair bit of experience testing these products and products that are selling at quite a rapid rate. The framework of the program involves a set of standardized test methodologies that are used to evaluate the products. A set of minimum quality and durability standards that are used to determine if the products meet a set of requirements. The quality standards focus especially on recent advertising, mainly ensuring that the products end up performing at the advertised levels that the companies are saying that they do. And in addition, we have a set of minimum durability requirements that are intended to ensure that the products will work for a reasonable amount of time. And then we communicate that information to market actors currently primarily through a set of standardized specification sheets. So if your product meets the minimum quality standards following the testing, the specification sheet will be developed for that product and it will be posted online along with a verification certificate. And that allows supply chain actors to verify that the products meet those minimum quality requirements. We have also been in the process of developing or exploring possibilities to develop a more consumer-oriented communication tool. And that's something that we're working towards but aren't yet ready to release. It's actually quite complex to manage at a global scale a consumer-facing quality label. And so that's something that we're hoping to work towards in the coming years. Going back to the beginning of the program, we had a set of key principles for setting standards and for managing the quality assurance framework. One of the key things is that we're very interested to ensure that and user perspectives end up informing our decisions along with other key stakeholders. And so we spend a fair amount of time conducting focus groups and using other means to collect information about consumer perspectives. And there, one of the things we're especially interested to ensure is that we end up having an appropriate balance between quality and affordability for the buyers in these markets. We don't want to set the bar so high that the products become unaffordable to the people who are interested and who need to buy them. We also don't want to set the bar too low so that it doesn't meet their expectations. And so we feel that that element is very important. As I said, using that information to seek that balance between quality and affordability, we also, as Peter mentioned earlier, are working with a technology that is changing quite rapidly. LEDs are improving at a very impressive rate. And so it's important to revise the thresholds for meeting the requirements fairly regularly in order to keep up with technology and market trends. At the same time, we're trying to maintain a predictable stable framework so that everybody knows what to expect. And so we try and also seek an appropriate balance between updating and maintaining a certain degree of predictability. As I mentioned, consumer perspectives are a very important part of the framework in our opinion. And so we've managed things through the use of a large number of focus groups where we collect information about people's perspectives. And one of the things that we've done is just try and understand what end users think about in terms of the information they want to have at the time of purchasing a product. And we use that information to inform which metrics or which areas we should focus on in terms of quality standards. And so in focus groups across five African countries conducted over the last few years, we found that the top five things that people are interested to know are, first of all, they want to know the light output, how bright will this light be. They're very interested in warranty terms. So if something goes wrong, what will I be able to do? What are the possibilities for repair and replacement? They're very interested in robustness and durability is very important to people. They're familiar with things that break and want something that has a certain degree of durability. They're very interested in mobile phone charging. And so in addition to lighting, they want to know if the product has mobile phone charging capability. And they're very interested also in the amount of operational time, the level of service that they'll get from this product. So how many hours of lighting, for example, will they get at that brightness level? And so a lot of our quality assurance framework is informed by these consumer perspectives on which metrics are most important. And we've conducted similar work and gotten similar results in the South Asia context. I mentioned earlier that the balance between quality and affordability is quite important. And so we've worked very hard to make sure that products on the $10 to $20 price range are ones that can meet the needs of people. Meet our requirement. We've seen that people are quite interested in products in that price range. And that's a price level that is affordable to a fairly large fraction of households in sub-Saharan Africa. And data from India gives a fairly similar result. And so we're looking at what consumer perspectives are in terms of characteristics and what things they want to know about a product before they buy. We're also considering the price dimension and broader approaches to affordability. In addition to consumers, of course, we're engaged with a wide set of stakeholders. We spend a fair amount of time engaging with governments and agencies within governments that are interested and active in the sector, as well as with private sector entities. And on the private sector side, the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association is a newly formed industry association that we engage with fairly frequently. We also work very closely with individual stakeholders, businesses that are operating in the space across the supply chain, as well as a wide range of other stakeholders such as test labs and development organizations that are active in this space as well. And so we see this as a framework that's providing an important set of information about quality. It provides a consumer protection dimension to the market and also involves this broad conversation across a wide range of stakeholders. We just, actually yesterday, announced a new set of quality requirements for the program. That was a revision that we'd been working on for the past four or five months. And so we're just at the tail end of a stakeholder process associated with revising our minimum quality standards going forward. There's a process that we'll engage in associated with revising test methods for the program in collaboration with the International Electro-Technical Commission, the IUC. And so we'll continue to stay active both in terms of revising the standards and test methods as the market continues to change, as well as in providing the testing and verification services and communication to the market as we have over the past few years. At this point I think we can go to questions and it looks like there have been some questions that have come in so far. So let us just quickly review some of those questions and we'll be able to circle back to the answer them. Thank you so much, Arnie. This is obviously a very comprehensive and overarching presentation and we have a few questions here that kind of dive deep and others that are a little bit more across the board. So we'll try to get to all of these and I do appreciate if everybody enters their questions into the Q&A window so that we can tackle them. So some of them have, I think, already been addressed so I think we'll skip a few, but there are some specific ones. I'm going to tackle this one here from Paul Scott. Scott, is there a labeling or a local system in place, something akin to the Rainforest Alliance for Coffee, where consumers, I suppose, or other stakeholders can hear the understanding of a particular lamp or a lighting source as been tested by a lighting global? So at this point we do not have a consumer facing label in place and what we do have is the standardized specification sheet framework and a verification system that works through a website. And that's a system that is aimed at this point primarily at actors further up the supply chain than the end users. And the reason for that focus, we felt that initially it was most important and most viable to focus our outreach on information about quality a bit further up the supply chain, partly because it's much less costly to reach people at that level because there are just fewer of them and our program resources were not unlimited and partly because the distributors and the financial organizations were in a good position to make decisions about the selection of quality products. We are very interested to move further down the supply chain in terms of being able to reach out to consumers with information about quality and the development of a label that would go on the product, on the packaging is something that we're interested in moving towards. I think it's very important not to try and do that too soon when you don't have all of the resources in place to achieve that. It's very extensive and very important to, once you do put a label out to police that label to have the resources in place to make sure that counterfeiting won't become a very big issue. And I would say that we've been moving slowly towards that but haven't yet reached the point where we're in a position to do that on a global scale. We do have some consumer-facing outreach that does focus on quality in the context of consumer awareness campaigns. And I would say that that's been most effective in the Kenya context where the consumer awareness campaigns have been quite extensive and there's a campaign that's planned for India that will be coming up in the new calendar year. But a consumer-facing label is something we're quite interested to pursue but haven't yet pulled the trigger on. Fairly, and I'm sure we can take some examples from pharmaceutical labeling and some of the issues that they've experienced in the developing world and trying to police those labels. Speaking to your point here about consumer awareness campaigns, there was a few questions that came in regarding supporting of that type of work I suppose as part of the Letting India program. There's any opportunities for individuals to actually be able to get engaged in this kind of work or groups of volunteers to join at the ground level. Can you speak to that please? And this is an India-focused question. Yeah, it seems to be an India-focused question but we can also cover it overall if you're interested. I would say in the India context that the India program is working towards launching a consumer awareness campaign that would happen starting sometime in the first half of next year. I don't know what the specific plans are in terms of all of the details but we'll have a better sense within a few weeks. I'm going to visit with the India team in Delhi in just a couple of weeks and so I'll have a better sense of exactly what they're planning. The idea of involving individuals or other organizations is a really interesting one and certainly I think there is always an interest to think about partnerships and what might be possible. So if there's a specific thought there or a specific organization that's interested in playing some role, I'd be interested to hear about it and I could certainly raise that with some of our colleagues with that Letting Asia program in New Delhi. Very cool. So another question came in kind of I guess swinging over to the supply chain side of the conversation and the market research side of the house for Lighting Global. Can you speak a little bit to the source countries for these lanterns? Can they be the same as the user consumer countries and why not have lighting in India come from India? I think we've been fairly agnostic about the question of where the products should be manufactured. We're certainly very interested and open to the idea that products would be manufactured in the country where they're being used. But we also think that if a product is manufactured in a different country that shouldn't necessarily be a barrier to making that product accessible to people who want to use it in a given country. It seems to us given the very high payback for these products at the end consumer level and the whole wide range of other benefits, we would want to make sure that the best and most affordable products are available to people regardless of where they're made around the world. Certainly there are a number of products. The majority of these products are produced around Hong Kong, that sort of Hong Kong, Shenzhen area. And there are a lot of good reasons why you'd want to manufacture products there related to the network of components suppliers that are available. And people are just able to drive down costs and have good quality products from that region. There's nothing that prevents people outside of that area from producing good quality products. And there are certainly manufacturers that do. But if the concern is about the energy that's required to ship the products, for instance, the shipping energy is a tiny fraction of the total energy it requires to make these. So the shipping energy and cost concerns are really not part of the picture. And then following up on the economic dimension of this, just as an example in a country like India, India does have a fair fraction of the products that the after lighting products that are sold there are manufactured in India. And a fair number are also made outside the country. India is a significant importer of petroleum products as well. And so in terms of importing things, if you use an after lighting product, whether it was produced in India or in China or elsewhere, the macroeconomic benefits for India, if that product is reasonably good quality and reduces the use of imported kerosene or imported petroleum that was used to produce that kerosene, the macroeconomic benefits for India are quite significant. Very interesting. So in terms of economic effects and economic models, I'm going to swing over to another question here. Have there been any developments in utilizing pay-as-you-go for solar lanterns with or without mobile money that you can speak to? This listener is familiar with co-scale pay-as-you-go called Angada. But what are your thoughts about this model of flash technology for small-scale lighting? Peter, you want to start or I can take it either way? Sure. I can see there are a great number of approaches right now to using pay-as-you-go as a financing mechanism for solar lanterns. So Angada is one. There are also M-Copa is one that's active in Kenya. There's another called, I'm forgetting now, Indigo, I think. In any case, there are tens of these different startup types who are entering the space. I think it's a very important development because it lets people spend money much in the same way as they currently do with kerosene, which is in small amounts day-to-day. As we saw when we showed the slide of people's income, even a $20 product can be weeks of income for people who might want to buy them. So if there was a way to do micro-finance essentially or pay-as-you-go for products, it really opens up the possibilities for people who are currently spending relatively small amounts of money but day after day on kerosene. It adds up pretty quickly. That could add up to the cost of a solar lantern. The traditional difficulty has been the transaction costs on those loans. And with a combination of mobile money and automated tracking and automated payment systems like these pay-as-you-go systems, it can drive the transaction costs on these financing schemes low enough that it's viable for relatively low-cost products in the $20 to $100 range. It's very important. I think that it wouldn't surprise me a bit if two years from now the majority of products are purchased this way, if this technology is really able to take off. There are a lot of people who are able to purchase them without pay-as-you-go. They're able to save money. But a much broader segment of the market I think will be amenable to them if it really works. And I think it will. And just as a point of clarification, typically pay-as-you-go systems is a payment mechanism where a person will gain access to a product and will make payments using some sort of mobile banking scheme or some other scheme where they're paying on a day-to-day basis and their ability to use that product is associated with the fact that they made a payment. And so one scheme, for example, the way that you buy the product is you put a small deposit on the product and then you get it and you install it at your home and you make 365 payments, small payments, which could be over the course of one year or you could stretch it out over a slightly longer period of time to make those 365 payments. And every day that you've made a payment, you can use the product. If you don't make the payment, then the product doesn't work for you that day. And once you've made those 365 payments, then you own the product and you don't have to make any more payments. And these schemes tend to be enabled most in places where the mobile banking sector is very well developed. And so a place like Kenya pays you go is really, I think, on the verge of taking off other countries where the mobile banking sector is more limited. It makes it a bit harder to manage these systems. There are schemes that don't rely on mobile banking that use scratch cards. So that's one way that people have worked around it. But let's get into the weeds. Thank you so much. We're going to, again, now kind of shift over to the quality assurance standards. And you started to seek a little bit likely to the evolution of the standards to aspect sustainability. And a few questions have come in related to that specifically. For example, one I'll just want to know if there are any health or safety issues with light produced by LED that you guys are considering as part of maybe sustainability or other of the met test methods. So maybe you can expand a little bit on what sustainability means within the context of lighting global standards and perhaps indicate how that product stewardship is going to be noted. Sure. I would say that there are at least three dimensions that we think about when we think about sustainability. One is just related very simply to product durability. The longer a product lasts, the longer it is before it has to be, before it breaks and ends up being either a disposal or recycling question. And so the durability question, of course, is one of the things that we consider in the context of sustainability. A second dimension has to do with end of life waste issues, both from the perspective of solid waste. These are mostly plastic products. And so if they fail and are disposed of, they can become part of the solid waste stream. But also there are concerns about things like batteries, which in many cases contain, or in some cases contain hazardous materials. And those materials have potential to be recycled. But managing that process is not a simple one. And so we're concerned about that issue. And then the third dimension that we would think about there is related to health and safety associated with the use of the products. It seems like the first question you're asking there is referring to in relationship to that third dimension. And at this point, we think that the research that we've done and the research that's out there indicates that the light levels associated with these LEDs are not associated with any significant health and safety issues. It is certainly possible to design very bright LED products that if you stared at them for a significant amount of time could result in some concerns about eye safety. But the products that we're working with tend to not be bright enough to do that. This is an area that we pay quite a bit of attention to. And one of the things that we've done over the course of time is develop a series of what we call briefing notes. Some of them are focused on technical topics. Some are focused on environmental and health related topics. But they're basically short expert papers that we write primarily with the manufacturers and others in the supply chain in mind as a target audience, as a way of trying to provide key information that they can use in the product design process in order to either make their products work better or be safer. And so we have two sets of briefing notes, one called the technical notes and the other called the eco design notes. And one of the notes that we've written and is available on our website focuses on that question of the health dimensions of eye safety and LED use. And that's something that we'll continue to monitor as the health research in that area continues. But everything that we've understood so far suggests that there aren't, for the range of products that we're working with, there aren't significant health and safety issues associated with them. That was an incredibly thorough answer to the question. And I do apologize to our listeners that we are currently over time. And I know that a lot of you have more questions that you wanted to get addressed, but we will make sure to begin with our presenters in order to have them address some of these by email. And perhaps we'll even consider doing a follow-up for a same-use article in order to really address some of these kind of key questions. I'd like to thank you all for participating. I'd like to certainly thank our presenters and also thank all of the attendees for your great questions and for your engagement. For those of you who are interested in getting your professional development hours, the code is listed on the slide that's being shown, along with the email address for you to contact our presenters, to contact the administrators for the CEU PH hours. If you have more questions, please do feel free to email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org and forget to become any first-time member so that you can get information directly in your inbox on upcoming webinars. Thank you all as you go ahead and have a great day or evening or afternoon, wherever you may be, and we look forward to seeing you on our next webinar. Take care.