Image courtesy Erik Martínez Resly
The first time Neha Misra visited the Sundarbans, a beautiful island of mangrove forests, her life was forever changed. It was 2005, and she was working for a large sustainability think tank in India, researching the economics of rural electrification. On the trip, she spoke to women about their first experiences with solar light and how it changed their lives.
One woman told a story of how much safer she felt at night. This was a tropical area with a lot of snakes, and if she ever got up in the dark, she was afraid she would be bitten. With a simple solar light, that risk was almost entirely gone.
“That was really profound because I had not seen electricity in that context,” Misra said. “That stayed with me.”
Misra, the co-founder of Solar Sister, which empowers African women to become entrepreneurs and sell solar lights and chargers in their communities, grew up in the urban area of Delhi, India. She had access to power most of the time, but as India’s population and economy grew, she experienced power cuts, reading by candlelight, and not being able to study while she was younger. As she got older, her life became “increasingly more electrified,” she said.
Her father is a mechanical engineer and her mother a doctor, so Misra was interested in science and technology from a young age. But from the time she was in high school, Misra also had a growing passion for economics. She split her studies between physics and economics for some time, but decided to pursue science through college.
Then, she switched back to business and earned her master’s in business economics from the University of Delhi. That’s where she really started to appreciate the business side of technology and science -- how economies change with evolving tech, and vice versa. While doing her master's, Misra got an internship with one of the biggest advertising firms in Delhi, doing consumer behavior research. A large part of her job was to find out what drove people to purchase Pizza Hut pizzas. After a while, the luster of that coveted internship wore off.
“There are two ways to reach where you want to reach in life, and some of us are lucky, we know what we want to do,” she said. “Some are not. It’s great if you want to sell pizzas, but I realized I don’t want to spend my days and nights increasing pizza sales.”
That’s when she joined the think tank. She wanted to help solve the problem that so many Indians and other people around the world faced -- lack of electricity.
“Yes you have to think about the technology, the R&D side of it, but once you have that part in hand, you also have to think about demand supply and behavior part of it -- how do you make somebody who has never used a modern lightbulb [switch from] kerosene?” Misra said.
She moved to the US in 2006 and did policy work and volunteer work for human rights campaigns, global initiatives, and more. She worked as an energy economist for the Indian think tank in the US, and then worked as the North American coordinator for the Lighting a Billion Lives Campaign, which was a project in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative.
In late 2009, Misra was about to turn 30 and started to question again what she wanted to accomplish in her career. She kept thinking about women across Sundarbans, and other parts of Asia and Africa where she had traveled who didn’t have light. Meanwhile, Misra was busy with conference after conference, traveling and speaking and shaking hands. She started to do some soul searching about climate and energy justice, and how she could make that part of her career.
“The world is so connected, more than ever,” she said. “We cannot continue to see people offline and living in darkness.”
Mega solar farms and connected grids are important, she said, but she didn’t want to forget about the 1.6 billion people who live without lightbulbs and still use dangerous forms of light like candles and kerosene. She wanted to focus more on the grassroots initiatives to solve these types of problems, rather than high-level events that she had been attending for so many years.
“I wanted to be a more force of change on the ground and get stuff done -- not just keep waiting for policy people,” she said.
Women, she knew, were more adversely affected by lack of electricity. Misra connected with Katherine Lucey, who had worked in investment banking and on community solar initiatives in East Africa. Both were looking for a grassroots, market based solution to address the huge gender dimension of energy poverty which disproportionately affects women all over the world.
Misra quit her job as an economist. They had no money, but Misra and Lucey started to build Solar Sister from the ground up. Solar Sister was founded on the idea of using social networks to reach markets where there aren’t other organized distribution chains, so women could more effectively lead their communities. It’s one part Avon, one part “
Since 2010, Solar Sister has grown to a large team now operating in Uganda, Tanzania, and Nigeria. About 2,000 entrepreneurs have been trained and the women have reached 250,000 people across the world, mostly through word of mouth. Solar Sister is not just about entrepreneurs and selling solar lights, but about local development -- creating leaders who understand tech and business and customer care. Now the mission is to scale, Misra said. It’s about building capacity for the mission and impact -- to empower women not only make their living, but also make a difference.
“I think for me the connecting thread is really beauty,” Misra said. “I live for creating beauty and living it. Solar Sister is about light, hope, and opportunity. To live a life of purpose and discover and create what your sense of purpose is, is so liberating.”
