This week the 2024 Ashden Award nominees were announced, and it’s always worth a look. The award goes to innovative climate solutions that serve the margins, with nominees from the UK and from the global south. It’s nice to see Power Station included in the UK list, a project I’ve written about and visited. The one that caught my eye this year though is from Rwanda, and it’s called OffGridBox.
OffGridBox make all-in-one boxes that provide essential services to refugees. They can deliver clean water, renewable energy and internet access in one go without the need for a grid connection. The hardware is all packed into a shipping container with a solar roof. That can then be delivered to refugee camps, disaster situations or remote areas, bringing services that often take a long time to get up and running.
Because it’s modular in design, you can tweak the services for the context. That could be a desalination unit for water, an irrigation system for farming, or extra solar panels serving 300 USB ports so that people can charge devices. Since its doing all this with solar power and batteries, it replaces the diesel generators that are often deployed in emergency situations.
The OffGridBox arrives ready to go and doesn’t need advanced technical skills to set up. It does need someone to manage the services on a day to day basis though, so the group train local women to be ‘Box Keepers’, earning them an income from community users. Some of them explain their role in the video below.
OffGridBox was founded by two Italian engineers and now has operations in Italy, the US and Rwanda, serving communities in several African countries.
Lots more to see in the Ashden shortlists and you can see the other nominees here.
The Earthbound Report 