Brightgreen Light Up Kenya Project

You can playback the Eastside interview with Dave from Brightgreen on Drive Monday

Kenya, located in east Africa, is one of the poorest countries in the world. Only a small portion of the population has access to a reliable source of electricity.

This is why Brightgreen, an Australian premium LED lighting company which enhances lives through viable energy efficient lighting alternatives, has introduced a campaign called the “Light Up Kenya Project: When You Light Up Your Home, You Also Light Up A Home In Kenya”.

This project is a solar-powered charity initiative that tackles the issue of light poverty in off-grid areas of Kenya. The project promises that for every $2000 purchase made through a Brightgreen retailer, the LED lighting company will donate a solar LED kit that includes a solar panel, two bulbs, a power storage system and mobile phone charging dock to an off-grid home in Kenya.

Brightgreen believes that everyone should have access to high-quality lighting, no matter where in the world they are. The company currently distributes high-quality LED lighting to Kenyan customers via a partner in Mombasa but these products rely on permanent access to electricity – something that 35 million (80 per cent) of the country’s inhabitants don’t have.

The most popular alternative to electrical lighting used by off-grid families is the paraffin lamp. These are expensive to fuel, costing up to 25% of a typical family income, and produce toxic fumes that are responsible for increasingly dangerous health and respiratory issues, leading to up to 12,000 deaths per year.

How does the project work?

For every $2000 purchase made through a Brightgreen retailer – the average expenditure when lighting a home here in Australia – customers will be given an 8-digit code, which allows them to activate their very own solar LED kit in a home in Kenya.
This code lets the company track each kit individually, ensuring that it is deployed effectively and providing a means for Brightgreen’s customers to access information about the home that they have lit up. Each kit includes:
• 2 low-energy LED bulbs: 4 hours of light each when fully charged
• 3W solar panel: light-weight, ceiling-mountable or portable
• universal phone charging dock
• replaceable battery power storage unit

The result: power for a family

Brightgreen has partnered with the Nairobi based lighting provider Sunlite Solar,the brainchild of Derek Steel, a Kenyan with Australian roots who lived and studied for a decade in Perth before returning to his birthplace in Nairobi. With this partnership, Brightgreen wants to ensure the responsible distribution and management of each Light Up Kenya donation.

Finally, the overall aim of Brightgreen is expressed by Brightgreen CEO and Head of Design David O’Driscoll himself within two sentences:

“By providing renewable, easily maintainable lighting to families in rural Kenya, Brightgreen aims to enable a
better quality of life around the world. Not only is access to sustainable lighting important for social and financial development, it is also the gateway to improved education and independent business endeavors, empowering off-grid Kenyan communities to
build their own futures.”

Dave from Brightgreen recently visited us at Eastside Radio to talk about “The Light up Kenya Project” with one of our “Drive Monday” presenters. To listen to the interview in full, and hear the whole story of what Brightgreen is doing for Kenyan families, you can go to Drive Monday in our program guide: https://eastsidefm.org/drive/mondaydrive/. You can replay all our our shows this way, for four weeks after they go to air.

More information about “Light Up Kenya” can be found HERE.

Light Up Kenya