For Jawa, it means much-needed extra income. When her husband died of a stroke in December 2022, Jawa wasn’t sure how she would pay for her children’s schooling. But when a neighbor got electric lighting shortly after, she realized she could continue weaving clothes for the market late into the evening.
“It used to be dark at night, now it’s bright until morning,” the 30-year old mother of two said, carefully arranging and pushing red threads at the loom. “So tonight I work … to pay for the children.”
Around the world, hundreds of millions of people live in communities without regular access to power, and off-grid solar systems like these are bringing limited access to electricity to places like these years before power grids reach them.