Now for a post from MEC fellow Jennifer, stationed in Lucknow, India:
On March 18th and 19th, Aryavant Gramin Bank (AGB) and Tata BP Solar, held a training program for over 200 facilitators, who are employees of AGB. These facilitators are responsible for advertising the solar lighting home system (SLHS) program, overseeing installation, as well as answering maintenance requests within 48 hours.
The high integrity of MEC’s carbon credits in the market (and to the carbon purchaser) really depends on the facilitator’s work in the field. For example, to register a household for carbon credits, MEC requires not only information about the system and loan size, but also its gps coordinates to identify its location where addresses can be very difficult to pin down. Furthermore, MEC requires each system to be monitored at least once every quarter. It is the facilitators that will carry these tasks out.
During the training program, I had the pleasure of teaching a few facilitators how to use our gps trackers. When we practiced in one village, I realized how well they knew each and every customer. I was not surprised to later learn that the facilitators were able to collect the longitude and latitude information of over 1000 households in the following two weeks. 27,000 households were able to join the SLHS program on the strength of MEC’s carbon program, and so it is our hope to start producing carbon revenues from all of them in the next coming months.
That’s about 135,000 people with access to clean energy!
