Clean Energy for the Base of the Pyramid in India: A Market on the Brink
Raj Kundra, Class 14 and Robert Katz
In October 2007, two socially responsible investment funds provided seed capital to a group of young entrepreneurs from Stanford University who were building a company to bring solar light to low-income customers in India and Africa. Both sides understood the disastrous economic, health, and environmental impacts of using candles or kerosene-based lighting, and believed that solar lanterns sold into rural communities could be the first step in demonstrating the opportunity to shift current practices.
Around the same time, a Silicon Valley venture group funded a fast growing solar company that wanted to bring a newly-designed solar LED lantern to India. The investors' due diligence uncovered a tremendous market opportunity for solar power in emerging economies, with over 400 million people in India alone inadequately covered by the electricity grid1 already spending over $60 billion on energy each year (primarily on antiquated and inefficient solutions). The company and its new investors planned to enter the market with a disruptively innovative, highly affordable lighting product, and then quickly follow with a full range of solar-powered appliances targeting this nascent consumer class—whose incomes and energy demands were expected to rise along with the fast growing Indian economy.Both investor groups invested in the same company, d.light design,2 which offers the potential of strong financial returns, impacts on poverty, and environmental benefits. At Acumen Fund, we've had the opportunity to help build a new sector of impact investors looking to deliver on this promise.
Impact Investment and the Base of the Pyramid (BoP)
We are 10 years into a journey of finding, funding, and supporting young enterprises like d.light—companies that use innovation and entrepreneurship to address issues of poverty by serving the basic needs of the poor. Raj Kundra is Deputy Chief Investment Officer at Acumen Fund, where he oversees Acumen's $75 million portfolio of investments in innovative social enterprises in Africa and South Asia. Robert Katz is a Portfolio Manager at Acumen Fund, where he focuses on knowledge management and applied research. We launched a renewable energy portfolio at Acumen four years ago, and today Acumen invests in 11 companies serving over 5 million individuals with renewable energy in Asia and Africa.
In this article, we examine India's clean energy market through the lens of d.light design and its peers, in order to assess whether businesses like these will be the exception or the rule (call them social enterprises, impact investees, or Base of Pyramid [BoP] companies). Will there be just a few initial successes (like d.light), or will an entire ecosystem of these companies emerge, some of which will fail but many of which will enjoy enduring growth?Understanding the opportunities and risks is the key to creating a scalable and lasting clean energy market for the poor in India. The opportunity today is great; the demand for clean energy products and services by poor customers in India is in many ways a "perfect storm" of need and opportunity, with many of the important pieces already present (e.g., technology, awareness, and market demand). However, d.light and other hopeful companies also face some major challenges in the existing ecosystem, including confusing and sometimes contradictory government policies, vocal skeptics who point to failed experiments by those too impatient to enter a new emerging market, and the inability of disparate groups of investors to develop clear methods of collaboration.As the example of d.light reflects, entrepreneurs may hold the key to India's BoP energy needs, but governments and investors must ensure that the environment is right for these ventures. The government should and will act: some simple but radical changes discussed below could make a big difference. Investors have an opportunity here as well, and are called on to invest in a new and exciting market, and to play a critical role in supporting companies that achieve both financial returns and social impact. Among all investors, the opportunity is most salient for impact investors as they can potentially bridge the gaps among philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and traditional venture capitalists.
The India Energy Opportunity
Nurturing the policy and funding environments to make renewable energy products and services available to the poor in India is one of the most exciting opportunities today for investors and the development community, and policymakers at the national and international3 level have pledged their support for this task. In terms of unmet demand, India is a large, very investible target. To sustain its economic growth rate, India will require a six-fold increase in power generation capacity by 2030—an opportunity that will require contributions from both traditional and renewable sources.4
Across India, customers rich and poor, urban and rural alike pay significant sums to finance their energy demands. The poor pay a disproportionate percentage of their income toward those needs, often with woefully inadequate access to modern services. Estimates vary, but experts agree that poor households spend between five and fifteen percent of monthly household income on energy. Aggregated at a macro level, this adds up to an annual household expenditure of $433 billion worldwide.5 But at a micro level, it sends a signal to entrepreneurs: the poor are willing to pay for energy, and indeed, they already are.Low-income customers' money is spent primarily on crude, environmentally destructive, inefficient fuels that have not reduced energy costs for the poor. Access to energy for the poor continues to lag: More than 45 percent of poor households in rural areas lack access to electricity altogether, while a staggering 85 percent still use conventional fuels (e.g., firewood or dung) for cooking.6 Simply put, the poor are spending more for less. Even with ambitious growth plans for the economy and energy infrastructure at large, nearly 700 million people will still be without access to the electric grid in South Asia in 2030.7Furthermore, success in this market—as measured by scaled, sustainable enterprises making a difference—has been elusive. Interested entrepreneurs face a series of obstacles in addressing this market, especially a lack of formal distribution channels to reach consumers. Both impact and commercial investors have found it difficult for this new and unproved sector to grow, particularly when utilizing a traditional venture capital (VC) funding approach. Despite policymakers' claims to the contrary, the existing set of government policies and regulations can be very difficult to navigate successfully.In sum, India is a rapidly growing market ripe for cleantech investment, with a somewhat supportive policy environment. The average Indian household—especially a poor household—spends a tremendous amount of household income on energy, indicating significant untapped demand. Finally, the per-unit cost to generate power in India is so high that renewable sources (with some subsidy) are becoming cost-competitive versus traditionally generated power, a markedly different situation than in the developed world.8
The Realities of the Renewable Energy Market for the Poor
According to the Government of India's rural electrification scheme, at least 125,000 Indian villages representing 375 million people are presently not electrified,9 and the Indian government in 2005 declared 25,000 of those "economically impossible" to reach via conventional means.10 Further, the electrifica-tion of rural India has been extremely uneven, leaving poorer states disproportionately in the dark; as of this writing, over 80 percent of households in states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Orissa remain without reliable access to electricity.11
Even as the private sector and government make progress, the International Energy Agency forecasts that more than 600 million people in South Asia will be off-grid in 2020, of which more than 100 million will live in India.12 Assuming peak demand of 1kWh per household, there is a 100 GW market opportunity to serve these individuals with distributed off-grid power. As a basis of comparison, the total installed capacity in India today is 182 GW and the largest energy player in India, Reliance Power, has capacity of 32 GW. A few motivated entrepreneurs and researchers have generated innovative approaches to addressing India's energy needs, sometimes in the face of significant opposition.
Case Example: Husk Power Systems
The story of Husk Power Systems began when scientists at India's premier research institutions told Gyanesh Pandey that rice-husk waste was chemically unsuitable as a fuel. Sugarcane worked, they agreed, and its byproduct bagasse, but the predominant agricultural waste of India's poorest regions (rice husk) did not burn hot or clean enough to power electricity generators.
Pandey, however, was not one to take "no" for an answer. An electrical engineer working in the semiconductor industry, he spent his weekends building a series of test gasifiers, each version increasingly appropriate for the rice-husk fuel he knew was plentiful. Finally, after a long iterative process, he arrived at a design that could work. Excited, he looked in vain for money to build it in his family's native village, Tamkuha, in the northern Indian state of Bihar; in the end, Pandey teamed up with his college friend, Ratnesh Yadav, and they both decided to fund the experiment from their personal savings. They set up the gasifier, filtering system, retrofitted diesel engine, and wiring scheme. In August 2007, they inaugurated the plant and brought grid electricity to Tamkuha for the first time.13This is no small accomplishment, but one small plant in one village powering 400 homes is just a drop in the bucket of need. Gyanesh, Ratnesh Yadav, and Manoj Sinha focused on how "Husk Power" could be built as a scalable, private utility company for the poor, not a charitably funded standalone project. After nearly four years, Husk Power Systems has more than 60 distributed, rural electricity generators up and running, providing reliable—and renewable—power to over 100,000 individuals every night.
Implications
The story of Husk Power Systems reflects what is needed to build a scalable social enterprise: a unique understanding of a technology and its implications at a granular level, strong connections to the community, flexible capital, and a team to take the idea to scale. There are some similarities to a Silicon Valley startup, but some real differences as well.
While the success stories of d.light design and Husk Power Systems are individually captivating, the overall clean energy market for the poor remains low, and a certain amount of serendipity seems to be required for all the pieces to come together. Recent studies14 on this sector in Asia and Africa still focus on the handful of start-up renewable energy companies in operation today, even while the general consensus is that the long term potential of this market is large.Why are the success stories so few? Partly, it is the nature of a promising but not fully developed market, but the situation also results from the dual headwinds of ambiguous (and often contradictory) government policy and under-developed financing markets, especially for debt and working capital. d.light's story illustrates these difficulties.
Case Example: d.light
d.light obtained initial seed funding in 2007 and completed a Series A financing in 2008 from a group of impact investors and traditional venture capitalists. While the motivations of each investor were slightly different, everyone shared common beliefs: that there is a large consumer market for well-designed modern lighting and energy appliances, that these consumers were being served by expensive and ineffective fuels (e.g., kerosene), and that the time was right for a successful product company to disrupt the kerosene-based lighting market globally.
With funding in hand, the d.light team designed their first products, began designing and manufacturing in China, and established distribution networks in India and East Africa. Two years later, d.light completed a Series B round and brought in another impact investor, and by 2011 had reached over 3 million individuals with its products. d.light has a potential path to profitability, as early vision and rapid growth have positioned it as a market leader.However, the company had entered a very difficult market in India. Kerosene, the alternative fuel source for the off-grid market, has been heavily subsidized by the government, providing a dis-incentive for customers to switch to solar products. Distribution channels were non-existent or poor for moving durable goods into rural areas where d.light products were in demand. Finally, while the investor group supporting d.light believed in its mission, there were only a few local investors involved, making it hard to navigate the complex relationships necessary to get things done in India.Conversely, in lower income and smaller markets such as Africa, d.light has had greater initial success. Tanzania's market is 5 percent as large as India's, has about 60 percent of India's per capita GDP, and is rarely viewed as a testing ground for new products and innovations. However, there are no subsidies for kerosene in Tanzania, making the fossil fuel market completely open—and consequently, two to three times more expensive than in India. In addition, there are fewer competitor products in the Tanzania market, 90-plus percent of the population is off-grid, and the rural supply chain is more accustomed to managing durable goods. The net result is that structural headwinds are much less significant, though consumer education is still an issue, and d.light has been able to achieve much greater market-penetration in Tanzania than in India.15
Implications
d.light's work in India and Tanzania has given the company deep insights into the needs of rural, off-grid customers. The company's challenges around marketing and distribution—especially in sparsely populated areas—suggest that social enterprises may need to engage in market- and capacity-building activities, which are typically not funded with commercial equity capital and may be better suited for philanthropic funding. Finally, unlike their purely for-profit cousins, social enterprises may be advantageously positioned to partner with large corporate social-responsibility initiatives and development agencies that can (under the right circumstances) be effective sales and distribution partners. These conclusions suggest the value of non-traditional approaches to capital.
The Value of Non-Traditional Capital Sources
Instead of seeking seed venture capital for its initial funding, Husk Power Systems relied on a series of grants from organizations, including the Shell Foundation, that were willing to fund the initial market-exploration work around building a small, village-level power utility. The company used Shell's money to scale from three to six plants, and then again from six to eleven, all the while learning chokepoints to avoid and success factors to concentrate on at the plant level.
Then, with a pilot cluster of plants operational and the requisite financial planning completed in 2008, Husk raised investor capital in 2009—in this case, from impact investors like Acumen Fund who were interested in the financial potential of the company. Importantly though, the impact investors were even more excited about the opportunity for large-scale social benefits with baseline financial sustainability, and this mindset created a funding opportunity with moderate return potential and aligned with grant capital.Additionally, this capital was complemented by a partnership with the Indian government. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, acknowledging that the company's economics would always be challenged by high capital costs, awarded Husk Power a capital subsidy based on the company's ability to deploy renewable energy utilities in villages otherwise economically impossible to electrify.16
The Role of Commercial Energy Players
Commercial energy players have also dipped their toes into the Base of the Pyramid market. British Petroleum launched its "Emerging Consumer Business" in India in 2005, with a flagship biomass fuel-pellet cookstove called the Oorja.17 Ultimately, while the technology worked well, the complexity of operating in the Indian market—and competing directly against the local liquefied propane gas (LPG) subsidy—led BP to scale back and ultimately abandon the initiative.
The company's experience indicates that international players remain interested in getting involved in the Indian opportunity, but that market size alone is not enough to ensure success. More than anything, the BP team simply did not take the time to see the business model through. Even when it became clear they might have had a winning product (over 400,000 stove users in four years) that would require significant tweaking on consumer delivery, packaging, pricing, and so on, it was already time for them to move on to the next potential opportunity. For a large international player with many priorities, the capacity was not there for a second iteration in a young market that would continue to evolve before scaling.Experiences such as BP's Oorja have driven commercial players to focus almost exclusively on less experimental, grid-based renewable energy project development. Traditional venture capital, private equity, and corporate communities have had success supporting clean energy solutions in India, but only with larger asset plays primarily focused on asset aggregation or paid deployment capable of generating capacity in megawatts, and typically feeding into the grid. (The long list of projects just in India includes those run by , Azure Power, Kalpan Hydro, and Orient Power.)These projects offer investors the opportunity to invest larger amounts, since grid-based projects can be executed at a significantly larger scale—not to mention more quickly—than off-grid initiatives like Husk Power. Successful developers execute a series of projects or aggregate existing projects into a single investment offering. In addition, grid-based initiatives are less risky due to proved government support, both through long-term power purchase agreements that guarantee electricity revenues (typically at premium prices) and through additional upfront subsidies for capital expenses and other project-development costs.While the focus on the more traditional on-grid initiatives is logical for larger players given their investment requirements, it has created the false illusion that renewable energy solutions for the entire market are growing. This is contrary to what we have seen in off-grid and BoP markets where support for scale-up has been harder to find.
The Role of the Indian Government
As these examples reflect, government looms large as a participant in the developing renewable-energy market globally. In fact, the Indian government is one of the more forward-thinking governments in the world: They have formed a Ministry of New and Renewable Energy that has been at the forefront of many programs to increase the adoption of renewable energies in India. Its initiatives include providing up-front subsidies for certain renewable energy systems, leading the push for India's National Solar Mission18 to create successful demonstration projects for solar deployment, and setting minimum renewable-energy standards at the state level. These programs have led to attractive state-level incentives, such as power purchase agreements (PPAs). Also called feed-in tariffs, PPAs are a powerful tool to provide renewable energy producers with guaranteed power sales to the state electric grids. PPAs have provided strong incentives due both to attractive price terms and long time horizons (as long as 15 years in some cases), thus reducing risk to the project developer.
These programs have incentivized some big wins. By June 2011, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy reported more than 20 GW of on-grid renewable energy and another 600 MW of off-grid, renewable power projects online. This figure includes more than 14.5 GW of wind power, making India the fourth largest player globally in terms of installed capacity.19Government incentives, however useful, have largely bypassed the direct-to-consumer and Base-of-the-Pyramid markets, which are in the greatest need of up-front support and long term risk mitigation. The relative difficulty in reaching these customers is clear, as is their need for services. What can the stories of d.light, Husk Power Systems, and British Petroleum tell us about moving forward and successfully addressing this need?
Recommendations and Steps Forward
Delivering clean energy to the poor in India is undisputedly a large and growing market opportunity. Despite this opportunity, fewer than 1 million "off grid" households in India are being reached by renewable energy solutions today; however, this slow start is normal for early-stage technology markets. Some have compared distributed renewable energy with mobile telephony in India, which took off only after regulatory and capital reforms.20 At Acumen, we believe that once the initial challenges around consumer education and distribution channels are addressed, the market will begin to grow rapidly, with manufacturing economies of scale kicking in and accelerating progress further. However, many unique barriers and challenges need to be addressed by market participants for this take-off to occur.
Government Policy
Perhaps the greatest new opportunity to accelerate renewable adoption by the poor lies with the government of India. To date, government incentives in India around household energy have involved a series of subsidies, feed-in tariffs, and household-level subsidies for certain fuels—most notably kerosene, propane (LPG), and selectively, electricity. These are significant programs that come at considerable cost (estimated at over $17 billion in 2009).21While the effectiveness of feed-in tariffs as an incentive for renewable energy generation is well proven, their efficacy in reaching truly distributed consumers with lower individual energy needs is less clear. Furthermore, the feed-in structure does very little to incentivize off-grid solutions such as solar home systems or the mini-grids that are needed for the most difficult-to-reach BoP households. Ironically, the distribution of household fuel subsidies has achieved considerable scale and distribution efficiency to just those difficult BoP households, and the impact of these subsidies has been quite remarkable: reducing fuel costs by 40 to 65 percent.22 Simply put, there is only a marginal incentive for a consumer to switch to renewable energy for any fuel usage below the allotment of subsidized fuel.Today, new product entrants have to compete with the energy subsidy directly, in terms of economic breakeven (competing against subsidized kerosene) and also on a cash liquidity basis, as the kerosene subsidy provides much of the capital and cash liquidity in the kerosene supply chain. One effective way to support and accelerate renewable-energy adoption by the poor would be for the government to move the subsidy directly to the consumer, breaking the link to kerosene and allowing consumers to express their preferences.
Investors
There is a significant role for investors here as well. The emergence of impact investing is inspiring the formation of a new asset class: one where investors have a long-term mindset around their investment periods, where experimentation (including failure) is part of the process, where success is measured both financially and socially, and where there is a strong interplay with philanthropic funding. Impact investors need to build upon their initial learnings here and define their investing mission in a highly articulated manner.
In addition to finding commercial market opportunities that also have positive social benefits, impact investing is about finding and supporting a different type of entrepreneur: There is a unique DNA to social enterprises (and the entrepreneurs who run them), one that we believe will drive extraordinary market discoveries and consumer impacts. While many aspects of the social entrepreneur's path will look similar to those funded by a traditional venture model, the danger of over-applying the venture capital model is real.Impact investors can and are helping to clarify their role in this space. These investors' ability to use unique funding structures that communicate their focus on combined social and financial outcomes, longer investment horizons, and lower expectation of big liquidation events could provide clearer guidelines to social enterprises. Some interesting experimentation is occurring in these arenas around areas such as self-liquidating equity investments (equity-loan hybrids), and revenue/royalty streams and social impact bonds.23 These solutions may help shift the mindset away from that of a pure venture capital model of quickly commercializing and monetizing opportunities.There is also a significant opportunity for more commercially minded "traditional" investors to re-orient how they think about the opportunity to invest in renewable energy for the poor, and in other emerging sectors that can reach the BoP. While we believe that the commercial opportunity for VC and corporate investors in this space is real, the models to reach the Base of the Pyramid remain highly experimental and will take continued evolution and iteration before successful ideas can go to scale.As such, the opportunity for traditional investors is to learn through this experimentation and bring their own knowledge and connections to work, rather than necessarily immediately capitalizing on a commercial opportunity. Areas such as distributed solar offer enormous consumer benefits that are increasingly obvious to even those in the most distant markets—but the iterations around financing, distribution, and government incentives are ongoing, and a premature push for scale and exits will not likely produce the financial or social returns that are possible. Commercial VCs might also consider partnering with impact investors, whose more patient capital and ability to extend on-the-ground support and guidance may complement their existing investing skills and ecosystems.
The "Perfect Storm" of Opportunity
India offers a potentially "perfect storm:" a large and mostly unaddressed market, rapidly growing energy demand (among all income levels, especially the poor), and significant shifts in the price of both conventional and renewable sources. The pieces of a very exciting market are there. But building a high-impact sector such as renewable energy for the poor is fundamentally different than other commercial opportunities; each player must adapt to those differences for business opportunities to succeed.
Entrepreneurs who are creative around costs, distribution partnerships, and willingness to work with grant-makers (which will come with tradeoffs) will likely have the staying power to see businesses through the longer gestation period. Financiers who are equally flexible in terms of their ability to provide non-traditional capital structures, access to philanthropic support, longer time horizons for investing, and deep understanding of local markets and contacts will also have the staying power. Finally, policymakers who recognize the unique opportunity this space brings and who develop creative, innovative incentives will be rewarded with greater economic productivity as their hardest-to-reach markets achieve more effective and independent energy access.The authors would like to thank both Jonathan Mazumdar and Taylor Ray for their valuable assistance researching and fact-checking this article. Any errors or omissions are the authors' own.
Raj Kundra
Raj brings over a decade of experience in the financial markets to Acumen Fund, a social venture firm focused on supporting enterprises that bring basic goods and services to the poor; he joined Acumen in 2007 to launch the Renewable Energy Portfolio and is currently Deputy CIO. Raj leads Acumen's principal investing effort in renewable energy as well as in capital markets, where he helped develop Acumen's strategy for raising invested capital—including the successful closing of Acumen Capital Markets, Acumen's first invested social capital fund. Previously, Raj worked at Lehman Brothers and J.P. Morgan for 14 years in various roles across capital markets, emerging markets, and derivatives. Raj has a BS in economics, cum laude,from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Robert Katz
Robert is a Portfolio Manager at Acumen Fund, where he leads the firm's knowledge management and applied research work. Prior to Acumen Fund, Rob worked for the World Resources Institute, where he co-founded and was the Managing Editor of NextBillion.net, a web site and blog about enterprise and development. He holds a degree from Georgetown University.
1 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2010: Executive Summary (Paris: Author, 2010), http://www.iea.org/weo/2010.asp.2 The two socially responsible "impact investing" funds to invest in d.light design were Acumen Fund and Gray Matters Capital. The company's more commercially oriented investors include Nexus Venture Partners, Garage Technology Ventures, The Mahindra Group and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Additional capital was later raised from Omidyar Network, another impact investor. For more, see http://www.dlightdesign.com/about_investors.php.3 The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, announced by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in September 2010, is one such example of international support (see http://cleancookstoves.org/the-alliance/).4 Rajan Gupta, Harihar Shankar, and Sunjoy Joshi, Development, Energy Security and Climate Security: India's Converging Goals, 2009, available from the Center for Nonlinear Studies website: http://cnls.lanl.gov/~rajan/Gupta_orf_writeup_v9.pdf.5 Allen L. Hammond, William J. Kramer, Robert S. Katz, Julia T. Tran, Courtland Walker, The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute and International Finance Corporation, 2007), 38. http://pdf.wri.org/n4b_full_text_lowrez.pdf.6 Sreyamsa Bairiganjan, Ray Cheung, Ella Aglipay Delio, David Fuente, Saurabh Lall, and Santosh Singh, Power to the People: Investing in Clean Energy for the Base of the Pyramid in India (IFMR Research and World Resources Institute, 2010), 7. http://pdf.wri.org/power_to_the_people.pdf.7 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2002 (Paris: Author and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2002). http://www.iea.org/weo/docs/weo2002_part1.pdf.8 Bairiganjan et al.'s recent IFMR/WRI report, Power to the People, focuses only on the rural consumer, and further only on cooking and lighting expenditures. They found that poor, rural consumers spend an average of 163 INR per month out of a total average monthly budget of INR 3,453 (or 4.8%) on cooking and lighting (9).9 "Electrified" is defined as grid connectivity to 10% of households in a village. This does not capture the quality or quantity of power provided; in other words, it does not reflect the fact that many "electrified" rural households may receive as little as four hours of power a day and voltage fluctuations that materially reduce the quality of lighting/power provided.10 Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana Brochure (Indian Ministry of Power, April 2005), 16–17.11 Christian Fuchs, Natalie Kurakina, Vinay Nair, and Steven Paling, Investing in a Brighter Future: Evaluating the Impact of Rural Electrification and Advancing Off-Grid Renewable Energy Policy in India, MPA Capstone Report(London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2011).12 International Energy Agency, 378.13 Based on Acumen Fund research.14 See, for instance: Bairiganjan et al., Power to the People; Melissa Baker and Peter Alstone, The Off-Grid Lighting Market in Sub-Saharan Africa (February 2011), http://light.lbl.gov/library/LA-Mkt-Synthesis.pdf; Jean-Elie Aron, Olivier Kayser, Laurent Liautaud, and Aileen Nowlan, Access to Energy for the Base of the Pyramid (Hystra and Ashoka, October 2009), http://www.microfinancegateway.org/ gm/document-1.9.40316/43.pdf.15 Based on Acumen Fund research.16 Based on Acumen Fund research.17 Described in Margot Cohen's article, "A Small Stove with Big Amibitions," YaleGlobal Online, 7 April 2008, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/small-stove-big-ambitions.18 Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission: Towards Building SOLAR INDIA, http://india.gov.in/allimpfrms/alldocs/15657.pdf.19 Government of India Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, "New and Renewable Energy: Cumulative Deployments of Various Renewable Energy Systems/Devices in the Country as of 30/06/2011," http://mnre.gov.in/mnre-2010/mission-and-vision-2/achievements/.20 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Engineering Solutions for the Base of the Pyramid (Author, 2009), https://www.engineeringforchange.org/static/content/Learning/ASME+Engineering+Solutions+for+the+BoP.pdf.21 Yale University School of Management, "India: Population and Power," SELCO: Design and Social Enterprise Case Series, http://nexus.som.yale.edu/design-selco/?q=node/90.22 Based on Acumen Fund research.23 A social impact bond is a contract with the public sector in which a commitment is made to pay for improved social outcomes that result in public-sector savings. Social Finance (based in the United Kingdom) recently structured one of the first social impact bonds, whose interest and principal payments are linked to the success of a recidivism program in the U.K. prison system (Social Finance, "Criminal Justice," http://www.socialfinance.org.uk/work/sibs/criminaljustice).
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