Smart Villages Foundation

Can remote villages have the same opportunities as urban centres? Can rural residents have access to careers, clean water, healthcare, education, productive agriculture and communication-without leaving their villages? Smart Villages believes that people in remote villages deserve the same opportunities as everyone else. Remote villages are often "off the grid" and do not have a reliable supply of energy for lighting homes, cooking, charging mobile phones, or powering businesses. The energy sources they do have, such as kerosene lamps, are often harmful to their health. The national grid may never reach many of these remote villages, but other solutions exist. We believe that energy access in off-grid communities is one of the services that can change lives-but only if it is implemented for the long-term and includes community involvement and training. And for development to happen sustainably, energy and other technologies must be harnessed for productive use, and for the innovative provision of community-level services (for example health and education), so that community residents are able to access all the basic services they need, despite their physical remoteness. Every village can be a "smart village." Smart Villages has provided policy makers, donors and development agencies concerned with rural energy access with new insights on the real barriers to energy access and innovation-driven rural development in villages in developing countries - technological, financial and political - and how they can be overcome. We are focusing more on remote off-grid villages, where local solutions (home- or institution-based systems, and mini-grids) are both more realistic and cheaper than national grid extension. But our approach is equally valid in other situations. Our concern is to ensure that energy access goes hand in hand with smarter, more integrated thinking about rural communities, and results in development and the creation of 'smart villages' in which many of the benefits of life in modern societies are available. In our ongoing work, we aim to demonstrate how Smart Villages and integrated rural development initiatives can be created in a sustainable and community-driven manner, and to evidence how this new holistic rural development paradigm can yield superior, lasting development impacts. We are also committed to investigating innovative technologies that can help deliver some of these integrated development objectives - for example innovative agricultural technology, cold storage, ICT access, remote education and telemedicine. We aim to win grant funding, and raise charitable funding, to implement projects to help catalyse sustainable community-led and focussed rural development worldwide, but particularly in Africa, where we already have a number of active projects.