Liter of Light

Illac Diaz is a social entrepreneur working to empower communities in the Philippines and around the world through several pioneering programs in rammed earth, bamboo, and PET plastic bottle construction.

He is the first Filipino to win the Zayed Future Energy Prize, considered to be the Nobel Prize for clean energy, in 2015. He is the private sector representative to the upcoming Dubai World EXPO in 2021. Celebrating culture, collaboration and innovation, EXPO, whose theme is “connecting minds, creating the future”, will convene on Dubai from October 2020 to April 2021. 

Illac holds a Masters Degree in Social Entrepreneurship from the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), a Masters Degree in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Masters Degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. He serves as a professor at the Open Online Academy where he lectures on post-disaster architectural designs.

Liter of Light has empowered the lives of over one million people a year across 32 countries since 2013. 

Traditional forms of logistics will remain central to humanitarian response, but local production techniques have the potential to improve efficiency and reduce costs, while building better local capacity. Most current models miss out on the local population's contribution to creating green jobs. 

Working with local women's cooperatives, corporate volunteers, and over 2800 youth ambassadors, our solar products are built and assembled at 1/3 of the cost of other products on the market, including a 20% retainer fee for livelihood programs. The villages receive both technology and skills transfer so that they can maintain and repair their units once our team leaves. 

Each of our hand-built solar lamps reduces carbon emissions by 1000 kg by replacing traditional forms of lighting, in particular kerosene, which burns 200 kg of carbon a year.

Almost one billion people, including 20 million Filipinos, live without access to electricity. Most currently available solar solutions are expensive, inappropriate, and neglect local development realities, with up to 70 percent of costs going towards logistics. On the commercial side, products are designed to not be repairable, putting beneficiaries in a loop of expensive microcredit to replace their units. 

Working on the ground has proven that large-scale solar panel installations fail. Most solutions bring technologies to energy-poor communities through top-down approaches, importing models without turning over skills or ways to repair them. The result is developing countries’ dependence on imported solutions to solve local problems. During national disasters, with communication and transportation networks down, communities become even more isolated from assistance and vulnerable to increased crime and security issues. As the touchstones for their families in the home, the burden of no access to reliable, safe, and affordable electricity falls disproportionately on women.

There is an opportunity for new technology or strategies to simultaneously reduce reliance on complex international supply chains, empower local markets, and provide tailored goods and solar products by producing them with community groups and vulnerable populations at the “hyperlocal” level.

The Liter of Light @ Night is a community-built solar battery kit for solar reading lanterns, mobile chargers and street lights. Micro solar panels, solarettes and other electronic parts, which are widely available, are assembled. With a simple circuit panel, drill, and soldering, a solar LED night light is built and installed. Our hyper-local production makes deployment in energy-poor areas quicker by putting the power (literally) back into the hands of the people.

Our primary business model is training women's cooperatives how to build our technologies. Rather than providing them with financial capital, we seed them the materials and tools required to build their lights. Upon completing their training, they are able to sell what they produce, including a suggested 20% retainer fee. A competing product with the same specific components with finished manufacture would cost almost three times the cost.

We are governed by South-South principles such as local ownership and leadership, access to raw materials, and technology transfer. In our experience, the number of solar lanterns, mobile chargers and streetlight solutions that are replicated are 6-10 times the number of those initially given in workshops due to these factors and not dependent on the initial investment. 

Since we began at the end of 2013, we have impacted one million lives a year across 32 countries. By making assembly and installation of solar lighting affordable and accessible through hyper-local production, we empower local communities that lack access to affordable, clean, and sustainable energy to be part of the solution and not just left in the dark. At each step of the process, the local community is engaged in the planning and development of the project.

Our core group of solar engineers and technicians is comprised of people who have been marginalized, like women in correctional facilities, or persons with disabilities who are normally not afforded the opportunity to participate in gainful employment or livelihood projects like Liter of Light @ Night. By involving these groups in the building process, we are building a cadre of solar engineers with technical skills to solve energy poverty in their community while ensuring that they earn at every step and maintain ownership over the technology. 

Our beneficiaries don’t just include our end users; they also include everyone who has benefited from our knowledge and skills transfer: volunteers from youth groups, corporate partners, and businesses; and micro- and SME-business associations, among others. 

Our grassroots approach puts the power (literally) back into the hands of the people. Those who were once neglected are now the architects of their own solutions. 

Rather than depending on imported, patented, and expensive technologies, our grassroots movement embodies the principle that anyone can be a solar engineer. We've built a strong bottom-up approach to a clean energy, something that will become increasingly important as climate change affects diverse communities.

We are quick, nimble, operate very lean, are the first to respond, and the permutations for innovation are infinite, since we embrace south-south principles, open-source learning and skills sharing.

In November 2013, SuperTyphoon Haiyan ravaged the Philippines. With 300+ kph winds and storm surges in the tens of meters, 10,000 people lost their lives and thousands more were displaced. With infrastructure in tatters and no access in or out of the city, many women, children, and the elderly - some of the most vulnerable populations after a disaster - were living in risk of crime, theft, rape, or worse. Liter of Light @ Night was the first group on the ground who put up emergency street lighting systems built within the community, even in a time of disaster, using locally available parts. These “corridors of light” reduced the incidence of crime by up to 70%.

This was our first intervention in providing community-built solar lighting in a post-disaster context, and we consider this to be the start date for our activities.

Video: Liter of Light @ Night in Tacloban - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PSsyufpZ2Q 

Liter of Light @ Night is an entirely different innovation and business model from Liter of Light, the plastic bottle daylight solution that began in 2011 in the Philippines.

As a serial entrepreneur, I've always focused my work on finding solutions to problems that we face in my country, the Philippines. I started out in alternative construction, figuring out new ways to design school classrooms so that young people could have a safe, affordable shelter to study in. It was in doing this work that I came upon the innovation that would eventually become Liter of Light. Light was one of the most expensive aspects of maintaining a classroom, and I thought that there was a way we could do this better.

More than the technologies or designs I've developed, I have been determined to show that Filipinos do not have to wait for solutions from abroad to solve social problems and that every person has the power to make a difference. In a reality where Filipinos are now known as the caregivers of the world - the caretakers, nurses, and essential workers that have shepherded many countries as the "unsung heroes" of the current COVID-19 pandemic - I have always wanted to show that we are as capable of coming up with our own innovations as the Western world.

MyShelter Foundation, which I founded, was the first of its kind, establishing a contemporary movement for alternative construction. Along with the Foundation, I also established the first global competition in the country, Design Against the Elements, to pioneer climate resilient and emergency architecture. I am currently the only Filipino Advisory Board member of the Special Program on Urban and Regional Design (SPURS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

My training prepared me to think about development and social enterprise in new ways. While building alternative construction classrooms, I realized that shelter was just one aspect of the community’s larger challenges. Creating a low-cost, sustainable form of electricity would catapult these communities into a better future.

My projects have garnered some of the world’s most prestigious recognitions, including what is considered the Nobel Prize of clean energy, the Zayed Future Energy Prize, the St. Andrew’s Prize, Asia Society’s Asian Changemaker Awards, and the United Nations World Habitat Awards. I am also an Ambassador to UNESCO's International Day of Light. In January 2018, I was part of the successful Guinness World Record attempt for the largest sustainability lesson. 

Most recently, for our leadership in conceptualizing, growing, and scaling Liter of Light, we were invited to be the Philippine private sector representative to the upcoming Dubai World EXPO, as the first Filipino and South East Asian to win the prestigious EXPO2020 LIVE grant which chooses 120 of the world’s groundbreaking solutions to be showcased in the OPPORTUNITY PAVILION.

Our Light It Forward Campaign is the result of the foundation losing its main source of income, solar DIY workshops. Liter of Light learned its playbook from Habitat for Humanity building homes where corporations are charged for the materials to build a home, and together with the (future) homeowners they would lay the foundation up to the roof together. In our model, solar (reading) lights, mobile chargers and street lights where parts are assembled in offices, schools and even on cruises with fees and later given to villages. Hundreds of thousands participated every year providing income for teams in 32 countries, till COVID happened and almost all offices shut down, ending income.

We decided that this campaign could be done from home. Starting with celebrities, one person challenges five others to build solar lamps, then another, then another, like corporate members, or fans. Light kits are delivered by bike around the city and motorbikes in the periphery. We still don't have a website on our third week but have 1300 orders and scaling rapidly enough for paying rent and salaries. We want to scale in other countries to restart income. We aim to reach 5,000 in 3 months in Manila.

Liter of Light was borne when the first category 5 typhoon landfall with 350 kilometer winds hit the province of Leyte. This killed almost 10,000 people and destroyed 4 million houses in a span of 24 hours. These tent cities were in the thousands and were running on wood and kerosene. Initially, the idea was to order thousands fo solar lights from China or India, but we realized the production even for 5,000 would have to wait for more than two months, plus high shipping. Rape and theft was high mostly for women, and kerosene burns were common specially those who had to live in the tents with a bottle of the flammable and toxic liquid.

Realizing that parts were actually available from the next city (Cebu) and one of the largest solar cell producer in Manila, we started hiring the women in the camps to make solar lamps by hand and got funds to make maintenance centers were they were paid to keep the streets lit. This ended up in doing 7,000 tents and bunkers in less than two months. Some of them even made them into rental businesses long after the tragedy.

There is an existing market need for clean energy; COVID-19 has put that need into sharp relief, along with the need to design new educational tools for families with young children who are unable to go to school because of this pandemic. (Public schools will remain closed for the foreseeable future.) Even in the midst of this global health crisis, access to digital tools can help generate employment opportunities across the country. Given our existing reach in these vulnerable communities, we have an opportunity and momentum to engage in innovative services while operating in a sustainable way. We would like to find new ways to have a consistent educational system using cheap educational tablets or secondhand cell phones.

We know there is a market for our existing solutions. We now want to use this opportunity to find out how to scale new innovations that enable villages outside of big cities to access new means of livelihood through access to light, information, and messaging services. 

Enabling people to connect to the internet is seen as the modern medicine against poverty in slums, since being connected enables people to access opportunities and information for livelihood. Our next phase includes creating "e-libraries" using wireless LAN repeater systems in our street lights, to not only empower communities with public lighting, and reduce the incidence of crime by up to 70%, but also enable them to access critical educational materials and messaging services. 

Thought partners (thought leadership, non-monetary partnership, volunteers):

UNESCO International Day of Light, UN Habitat

Funders:

EXPOLive Impact Innovation Program, Zayed Sustainability Prize, Rotary International