tristan_ko

I fully agree.

That's why Louise, my co-founder, is Beninese, and so is our local Manager in Igbérè. You can see them both in the film. Also, Jacques, who came to help us build our grid, is precisely a professional trainer. He showed us how to build, and we learned (I don't have a technical background myself). The grid was built by the locals (it's said in the film as well). As Power:On grows, we will hire more people to build our team. There are plenty of local technicians and engineers.

Finally, the point is not to build grids for the sake of it. We do it so the villages can trigger economic development. It's a tool for local entrepreneurs to launch and grow businesses. This is our core mission. Our major impact will not be to train people to build electrical grids. It will be to give entire villages the means to thrive.

Your point is valid, but this project is not like what you may have seen before. We're on the same page. I hope you'll see that if you visit our website, watch our film, read our manifesto

It took a lot of persistence, some guts and a little luck! I really wanted to have her narrating. I reached out to several of her agents. Most did not reply, or told me she was not available. At the last minute, one of them replied: she was in! It's really a dream come true. She's very nice for doing this!

Right now, love money from family and friends (around €70k). I was very lucky to be able to count on them. In the near future, we will launch a crowdfunding campaign to upgrade to solar

It's for-profit, however I'm not making money from it yet (not since 5 years). It's basically philanthropy right now.

The reason we are for profit is that I want to we prove that we can bring electricity to the remotest villages on the planet in a sustainable and profitable way. If I succeed, I'm convinced this issue will be solved very quickly. I wrote a post about that: https://medium.com/turnthepoweron/ngos-fail-1fc03aa1f917

partnerships are incredibly hard to land when you are only starting up. Maybe this will be an option in the future, since we gained a little recognition thanks to that film.

The model is indeed pay as you go. The villagers only pays for the electricity they use and this allows us to pay a salary to our local manager, fuel and maintenance, and hopefully profits that we will reinvest in other grids.

The crowdfunding campaign will help us pay for the investment for solar panels, etc. In the future, we expect to be sustainable and profitable on our own