GIVEWATTS and The Spectrum IFA Group
By Spectrum IFA
This article is published on: 17th December 2014
Please see below an open letter sent to The Spectrum IFA Group
by GIVEWATTS
Dearest Christine and Chris,
I hope you are well indeed! You have a big place in my heart, part of my secure base. Thank you for everything you have done and for always being there!
I can’t thank you and Spectrum enough for the support to GIVEWATTS over the years! It has meant a great deal, both in terms of funding (see attached project update), but also morally. You joined us at an early stage, taking a chance on something you believed in. I am happy to say that it is really working now, and it also has a great deal of impact.
It has been a very good year for GIVEWATTS. Our partnership with Spectrum has been a key component in our being able to scale up during the year. We have grown into 649 schools across Kenya, and we are starting in Tanzania early next year, and DRC a month after that. More reasons for you to come and visit again!
The school calendar has all the kids in Christmas recess now, and we are waiting for the final grades for the last term in January 2015. In the current report the improvement is at 7%, and this reflects the changes between a county wide diagnostics test and the national exam. After that we will update those numbers, as well as the changes in school ranking. You should expect a change of around 20%, which is the average change across our Kenyan schools between two national exams.
You will be pleased to see that 107 lamps have been paid off. The balance of lamps have been signed up for and are being paid for now. The total savings for the households is almost CHF 40K, and using the most conservative measures available (100 kg of Co2 per replaced kerosene lamp) so far the project has offset a total of about 17 tonnes of Co2. This calculation is based on number of total days lamps have been replaced. For comparison, for the total 265 lamps in the project, the saved emissions will be 26,5 tonnes per year. As the number of lamps increase, this number will go up.
I also include two impact videos. Short and concise for busy Spectrumers. We are also changing our project page on the website again, to make it more interactive. The local web developer we are using says that this will be done early next week. As soon as we have it, I will send you a note.
I hope to make it to Lausanne in the first quarter of 2015, and I will so very much take you out for a meal to celebrate our joint success! And just to have a curry with some great people!
A very Happy New Year!!
Jesper Hörnberg
To download the full report please click here