In Bangladesh, The country on the front lines of the climate crisis has at least 4 million solar panels, enough to power more than 20 million people. Most of these systems are small, operating in private residences or small businesses, and are a necessity in a country that regularly suffers from power outages and tropical storms. Around 2015, Sebastian Groh, his CEO and co-founder of SOLshare, came up with an idea: What if your solar-powered home could share electricity with the people around you? Grow worked with a team of local engineers to build a small-scale peer-to-peer solar power network, the first of its kind in the world.
“We built this peer-to-peer network even though we didn’t know what it was. new york times The World Economic Forum picked it up and said, “The first peer-to-peer grid was built not in San Francisco, New York, or London, but in a village in Bangladesh,” Groh says. The reaction was a surprise, but for Groh, who worked on energy solutions during his time at Stanford University, the SOLshare story could only happen in Bangladesh. “We tried to do this with the resources and staff at Stanford, and it didn’t work. When we tried it in Berlin, it didn’t work,” he says. “The only time it worked was when we brought it to the field and had a local team, and we were able to iterate very quickly.”
For the past decade or so, the technology world has been dominated by the search for “unicorns” — multibillion-dollar companies with enormous scale and global reach. Most of these companies are focused on geographic locations in the Global North, such as Silicon Valley, London, Paris, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. However, this model may be inadequate when it comes to finding urgent solutions to climate change.
“Perhaps we don’t need to look for so many unicorns in the sustainability field. Perhaps with tens or hundreds of thousands of climate startups we can have a bigger, more comprehensive impact.” ,” says Alejandro Crawford, one of Groh’s collaborators and CEO and co-founder of entrepreneurship platform RebelBase. “Then we address the real problems, because they are the closest to the problem and therefore we can understand it better.”
Climate entrepreneurs in the Global South face a challenging environment. In 2021, for every $1 venture capital invested in Bangladesh, it was $4 in Nigeria and $808 in the United States. “If you look at the distribution of financial resources, it’s very heavily biased, not just against the so-called West and the North, but even against certain regions like Silicon Valley,” Groh said. But it’s more than that. It’s also a skill and community that helps individuals with ideas find like-minded connections that can grow their businesses.
A great deal of will and energy is being poured into tackling the climate crisis, but as we can see from the global protests, potential entrepreneurs often find it difficult to develop solutions. I feel short of breath. “How can we channel this enormous energy into productive change, into projects, into companies, into social business?”
At RebelBase, Grow and Crawford provide a community of support for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to tackle the climate crisis. Founded in 2018, the company now works with teams on five continents, providing mentorship and connections from experienced entrepreneurs to startups that may lack the opportunities available to people in the Global North. , provides training. Crawford, for example, is leading a company based in Accra, Ghana, that can make more sustainable charcoal from coconut waste. Guro is working with a Dhaka startup that wants to make alternative leather from jackfruit.
