When people talk about scaling up a project, they usually start small. But everything’s relative, and for the Solar Urja (energy) through the Localization for Sustainability (SoULS) initiative in India, the leap was from one million to seven million solar lights for Indian students.

And because the Energy Swaraj Foundation promotes ‘energy by locals for locals’, the project trained about 9,000 local women, who assembled, sold, and maintained these solar lamps regionally, reaching nearly 40,000 villages across seven states.

So not only did seven million students get lights, but about 1,000 women are now self-employed and running their own solar shops. This work, which took place 2015-2018, won the Empowering Billion Lives competition organized by IEEE in 2019 and received a global grand prize of $100,000 USD.