Candela Energy: An ETH4D Grant Makes Serving the Underserved a Possibility

by Amartya Mukherjee, MSc student, 2 June 2022
Cart in blue, white and yellow
The Solar Cart to disseminate products (photo credit: Candela Energy)

To truly help communities in need, it is important to genuinely listen to their REAL needs, understand their REAL stress points, and attend to the differences between them.

A small group of passionate engineers from diverse fields got together one evening in 2020, to ponder over the fact that “There is an abundance of life improving solutions being developed by local and international enterprises, but in the global south they are hardly seen in the hands of the people who need them the most”. To bridge this gap that exists between enterprises developing life improving products and marginalised communities without access to them, we initiated our venture, Candela Energy.

The above observations took shape through the founders’ experiences: ranging from field work in the villages of India, Kenya, and refugee camps et cetera, to product development and research at MIT D-labs, and ETH4D, among others. Actual conversations with people within disadvantaged communities revealed an alarming fact: they were oblivious to the social enterprises and innovative minds developing solutions to improve their quality of life. Probing further, the team identified that a critical shortcoming is the inability to match the real needs of a community to the services being helicoptered onto them.
People standing around the solar cart
Interacting with communities (photo credit: Candela Energy)
We often consider the analogy that quite frequently we are participating in volunteer activities half way across the world, that serve to makes us feel better about ourselves — rather than the members of community being interacted with. Do they really need someone to abruptly install solar panels on every house — or do they need to know how to acquire, maintain and utilize these themselves? Does building a community kitchen really help, when clean cooking stoves are needed in every house instead? The insight that every community is unique, and every solution needs to be customised with respect to the unique way of life is something we have learned along our humbling journey.
During our pilot through ETH4D’s grant, we confirmed that products and services which seem obvious to us are not so to the majority in underserved communities. Most do not KNOW about several of these life-improving products, if they do KNOW about these, they do not KNOW how to acquire them: for this they also need the financial literacy to invest in a product with high upfront costs.
People sitting together and discussing
On-Ground representative in conversation with village members (photo credit: Candela Energy)
A crowd of people standing in front of the solar cart
Serving the communities interests and needs (photo credit: Candela Energy)
So what does Candela do? Candela first helps them KNOW and then acts as a distribution platform. Candela creates a physical platform in these communities that is operated by trained members OF the village, now micro-entrepreneurs, where he or she interacts with the community to truly identify their needs. This not only *breaks the ice* to create the all-important factor of trust in this market, but also creates jobs. Appropriate products or services are then catered to them based on the data collected, which otherwise is not easy in such locations through “online research”. Through Candela Energy, we hope to be a window for the under privileged world to the more fortunate world.

Candela is a young, growing but passionate team working across timezones. We are actively looking for investments to scale up our operations, create a network of thousands of such platforms, and serve this huge market. To run such a human-interaction heavy organisation, we continuously expand our team on all possible fronts. We welcome your questions, comments and more.
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Photo credit: Clara Diederichsen

About the author

My name is Amartya Mukherjee. I am about to complete my MSc in MTEC from ETH Zurich. I am passionate about implementing clean energy technologies through a combination of engineering and business expertise to augment our efforts against Climate Change. I spend an ample amount of time hiking mountains around the globe, exploring various cultures and appreciating differences. I co-founded Candela Energy and strongly believe that the access to energy fosters economic growth, social equity and ultimately environmental sustainability.