The Light Comes Into Focus

_{See this article and many more at https://www.sustainabilitydecoded.com/}

(1) When I think of Africa, I think of sunshine. (2) Indoor air pollution kills 697,000 people a year there. (3) Some MBA students saw the problem before most, but it wasn't their time. Surprisingly, these three things are connected.

It was the spring semester of 2012. Somewhere between the end of the financial crisis and the beginning of everything becoming an app, four MBA students at the Thunderbird School of Global Management were randomly assigned to a team.

They had never met each other. They would never all be in the same room at the same time.

The class was GM 4402, Global Enterprise, taught by Dr. Robert Hisrich, one of the foremost scholars of entrepreneurship in the world. The capstone assignment was straightforward enough on paper: identify a global business opportunity and build a plan to pursue it. Pick a market. Do the research. Make it real.

What made this particular team unusual, even by 2012 standards, was where they all were. I had just moved back with my family from London coming home from a bi-lateral liaison assignment working with UK intelligence agencies and the British Foreign Office, with orders already cut for my next posting at Yokota Air Base and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. It would turn out to be my last assignment as a Senior Intelligence Officer before leaving government service to pursue a PhD. Brie Lam was jet-setting between British Columbia, New York, and Bermuda. Kristen Turra was in the UAE, where she had spent years working on supply chain and rural development across sub-Saharan Africa. KC Northup (then Bashant) was stateside, working with her clients up and down the eastern seaboard.

Four people. Four time zones. One Google Doc, every free useful website or tool we could lay our hands on, and a shared conviction that we had found something worth building.

We called it "Sol Power."

A note on the video: I made this myself, using whatever free tools were available in 2012. The geospatial visualization of nighttime light data came from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, displayed on Google Earth. I did the sound design in a free audio software. And it seemed most fitting to use “Blackwater” by Octave One as the key soundtrack, one of my favorite tracks from my days as a techno DJ (a story for another time). The production value is, charitably, amateur. But we were MBA students with laptops and an idea, and somehow that felt like enough.

The paper we submitted to Dr. Hisrich earned us a 97 out of 100.

We also entered the project into the 2012 Hult Global Case Challenge, at the time the world's largest student social entrepreneurship competition, run in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative. Thousands of students from over 130 countries competed across three tracks: education, energy, and housing. The energy track that year had a specific, pointed challenge: help get off-grid solar power and light to one million households in Africa.

We advanced to regional finals, which were held simultaneously on five continents. Teams that advanced from there would go to the global final at the New York Public Library. There, the winning team would be announced by the keynote speaker, who would personally present the award and meet the winners.

The prize was one million dollars in seed funding to actually build the thing.

Handed to your personally by:

Former. President. Bill Clinton.

………. and then ………..

We did not win.

Sorry if you thought this was going in another direction. We will come back to this.

Before we go deeper into what Sol Power was and what happened to it, it is worth pausing on what is actually happening in Zanzibar today.

The “Solar Mamas” are women, many of them grandmothers with little or no formal education, trained by Barefoot College International to wire, install, and repair solar systems. They come from villages that have lived off the grid for generations. They go home and electrify them.

Hamna Silma, a mother of eight, once kept a kerosene lamp burning through the night so her children could study. She had to stay awake to move it before they fell asleep, so they wouldn't burn themselves. Today her home runs on solar power.

Tatu Omari knew nothing about tools when she started. Now she installs solar kits that power entire homes. Women who were once mocked for doing what was called men's work are now training others and being asked for recommendations.

More than 1,800 homes have been lit so far. Barefoot College has expanded its training to Malawi, Madagascar, Senegal, and Somalia. The model is working.

The model is also, in ways that matter, remarkably similar to the one four MBA students sketched out in a Google Doc in 2012.

To understand why so many people have been working on this for so long, including the four MBA students from our story, you have to understand the scale of what we are actually talking about.

Africa is the continent where humanity began. It sits, alongside Australia, as one of only two continents in the world that glows brightest on a solar energy map, from coast to coast. And is the anchor for what is known as “the Sun Belt”.

And yet hundreds of millions of people across the continent have no reliable access to electricity. Not because the resource isn't there. Because translating that massive potential into energy that empowers lives for Africans has been the hard part.

Without electricity, families do what families have done for generations. They burn things. Kerosene lamps for light. Coal and biomass for cooking. Open fires in enclosed spaces.

The result is a public health catastrophe that most of the world has never heard of.

Indoor air pollution claims 697,000 lives in Africa every year, even more than malaria (which kills approximately 580,000). It causes stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic respiratory disease. Almost half of all pneumonia deaths in children under five are caused by the soot they breathe inside their own homes. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor air pollution can reach levels 100 times higher than WHO safety thresholds.

The people who bear the greatest burden are the ones who spend the most time indoors. Women. Children. The same people the “Solar Mamas” are now trying to reach. The challenge has been logistics: getting small, affordable, durable solar technology into the hands of families who live hours from the nearest grid connection, who earn less than twenty dollars a week, and who have no realistic alternative to burning kerosene after dark.

Africa is not just physically the sunniest continent. It is the birthplace of humanity's oldest and most elaborate relationship with the sun as the source of life, power, and creation. The ancient Egyptians built entire civilizations around worshiping the sun as a deity, from Atum to Ra to Amun-Ra.

The resource is there. It has always been there. So has the challenge. This is not a new problem. It has been a known problem for decades. The question has never been whether it needed solving. The question has always been how.

That is the problem Sol Power was trying to solve.

The business plan the team built centered on a product that already existed: the d.light S250, a small solar-powered LED lamp with a detachable solar charging panel and a mobile phone charger port. It weighed 350 grams. At full brightness it lasted four hours and was ten times brighter than a kerosene lamp. Dimmed to its lowest setting, the same charge stretched to 100 hours. The integrated solar panel also included a cell phone charger port, capable of charging most mobile phones to 80% capacity in an hour. Keep in mind, this was 2012. The technology has advanced significantly in the last 14 years.

But the insight was not the product. The insight was the business model.

In rural Tanzania in 2012, mobile phones had achieved near full market penetration, a decentralized approach that had leapfrogged the landline era entirely. But power hadn’t caught up yet. People were traveling up to five kilometers just to charge their phones. Mobile phone charging businesses existed throughout the country. What they lacked was the capital, the marketing, and the distribution infrastructure to scale.

Sol Power's plan was to provide a complete turnkey solar light rental business to local entrepreneurs, with microfinance partnerships to fund the initial purchase, mobile phone marketing to reach customers in areas with high phone usage, and a lease-to-own model priced at roughly four dollars a week, slightly above the cost of kerosene but within the budget of families earning more than twenty dollars weekly.

The target entrepreneur was a rural woman, twenty-five to forty-five years old, with school-age children and at least one mobile phone. The research showed that rural women were disproportionately burdened by the cost and logistics of buying kerosene, and would see the greatest advantage in a solar alternative. They were also, the team believed, the most likely to build sustainable community businesses around it.

The Hult Global Case Challenge was already on our radar when we were still finishing the business plan. We saw an opportunity and entered. The energy track that year had a partner: SolarAid. The specific ask: help get off-grid solar to one million households in Africa. We thought we had something worth submitting.

So we went after it.

We built a campaign. We created a website on the now defunct Google Sites to drive votes. We reached out to every current Thunderbird student we could find. We worked with Thunderbird's alumni engagement network to contact graduates around the world and ask for their support. We tried to get an article in Das Tor, the student newspaper, but ran out of time before voting ended. We worked with Thunderbird's social media team. Dr. Hisrich, thrilled that his course's capstone had taken on a life of its own, became our faculty advisor for the competition.

None of this is remarkable in isolation. Students enter competitions all the time. They build websites. They send emails. They ask their professors for help.

What is worth sitting with, looking back, is the specific quality of the effort. It was not strategic. It was not calculated. It was earnest in the way that things are earnest when you are young(er) and you do not yet know the precise odds against you, and you have latched onto an idea that feels, in your gut, like it matters.

We were not trying to get rich. We were trying to light people's homes.

We could not have told you, if asked, exactly why it meant so much. But it did. And so we kept going, across four time zones, on laptops and free software and a faith that the work was worth doing even if no one was watching.

As you already know, we did not win the Hult Prize. The feedback, when it came, was that the judges were not sure the logistics infrastructure was in place to support our distribution model.

In fairness, the judges were probably right. Not about the problem. About the timing.

The last-mile economics were genuinely hard to crack in 2012. The microfinance infrastructure was not yet robust enough. The distribution networks did not exist. And the four of us trying to build this were students with laptops spread across the globe, not operators on the ground with capital.

But as a former US Defense Secretary once said, there are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

Four people, randomly assigned. Each of us carrying, without knowing it, exactly one piece of what it would have taken to build the thing we were trying to build.

We had no idea how close we were to wrapping our fingers around that lightning.

Brie Lam went on to continue her career as a successful entrepreneur and global business leader. She co-authored the world's first crowdsourced book on LegalTech (legal technology), a work built collectively by contributors from around the world. The crowdsourced part is not incidental. It is a direct echo of everything Sol Power was trying to be: community-powered, built from the ground up, better because more people had a hand in it.

Kathryn Northup, who was KC Bashant back then, now leads scale-up engineering and product development for one of the world's largest building products companies. Her job, in essence, is to take engineered products and make them more efficient, more manufacturable, and more deployable at scale for higher ROI. If Sol Power had become what it was trying to become, that is exactly the role it would have needed her in.

Then there's me, your author. I transitioned from my career as a spy (Senior Intelligence Officer for the U.S. government) to a PhD focused on solar and the global energy transition. Now I work with the largest companies in the world helping them deploy solar, battery storage, EV chargers, and other on-site energy infrastructure.

But my favorite in this epilogue is Kristen Turra. When I saw the “Solar Mamas” video come out, I made a group chat and sent it to my old Sol Power teammates. It had been far too long since we'd all talked. And what is Kristen doing? She immediately replied to the group chat, "Great to hear from you. Yes, that is a great story. I actually work on a sustainable tourism project in Zanzibar." Sometimes you have to go all the way around the globe to come full circle.

I am immensely grateful to my teammates Brie Lam, Kristen Turra, and KC Northup, and to Dr. Robert Hisrich for his mentorship. And to the Thunderbird School of Global Management for putting us all together.

Fair question. This piece is a personal narrative about four MBA students, a business plan, and a competition we didn't win 14 years ago. It does not have a framework. It does not have a listicle. It does not tell you how to build a stakeholder engagement matrix or decarbonize a supply chain.

So why is it here?

Because if you work in sustainability, you have lived some version of this story. Maybe not with solar lamps in Tanzania. But you have been in the meeting where the idea was right and the moment was not. You have watched a proposal you wrote two years ago get implemented by someone else, with a different budget, at a different point in the development cycle. You have felt the specific frustration of knowing exactly where things need to go and being unable to get there fast enough, because the grid wasn't ready, because the CFO wasn't convinced, because the regulation hadn't caught up, because the technology cost curve hadn't fallen far enough yet.

That gap, between knowing what needs to happen and being able to make it happen, is not a failure state. You are not a modern-day Cassandra. It is the normal condition of the energy transition and sustainability as a field. It is where most of the work actually lives. And if you’re not knowingly nodding your head right now, take this story as a stark illustration of the career you’ve signed up for.

Sol Power was not an outlier. It was a case study in the most fundamental dynamic of this field: right diagnosis, incomplete toolkit, wrong timing. That combination describes dozens of technologies, business models, and policy frameworks that are sitting in someone's files right now, waiting. Complete and robust commercial EV charging infrastructure networks. Long-duration storage. Perfect carbon traceability across nth-tier supply chains. The ideas are not wrong. The moment just hasn't arrived yet.

What Sol Power also shows, and what the epilogue of this story makes uncomfortably clear, is that the toolkit was always there. The people who needed to build it went off and built the pieces separately, in different industries, in different corners of the world.

The diagnostic work you do today, the business cases that don't get approved, the pilots that don't scale, the proposals that arrive three years before the organization is ready, all of it is load-bearing. Someone is going to build on it. Maybe it will be you. Maybe it will be someone you've never met, in a place you've never been, fourteen years from now. Your work is not wasted just because you are not the one who closes the loop. That is how sustainability works, it’s a feature, not a bug. And you do the work anyway.

Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1910 speech at the Sorbonne that gave this series its name, said it better than I can:

If you’ve read this far, I can tell you for certain that you too, are in the arena. The critics, the naysayers, the head-in-the-sand avoiders, and the wait-and-see bystanders, they are in the bleachers stuffing themselves with hotdogs. Stay in the arena, my fellow Decoders.

—Wes