Monthly Newsletter: Nov 2007

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d.light design (www.dlightdesign.com) is a social enterprise dedicated to bringing modern lighting and power to underserved populations including 1.6 billion people currently without electricity globally. We are financed by venture capital firms including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, Mahindra and Mahindra, and Nexus India Capital. We also have investment from leading social funds like Gray Matters Capital and Acumen Fund. Our vision is that in 10 years we will partner with other organizations to replace every kerosene lantern in the world with safer, brighter, and more affordable lighting.

Highlights

The Gift of Light

We believe that the most effective way to achieve our vision is by desiging and commercializing lighting products at prices “base of the pyramid” customers can afford. However, we are aware that there are some families and communities that will not be able to afford our products unless heavily subsidized. For this reason, we are establishing dlight.org, a nonprofit spin-off of dlight that will allow people to provide light for families making about $1 a day or less . This holiday season, for $30 you can provide a dalit (formerly "untouchable caste") family in India with a complete solar lighting solution. As a thank you, we will send you a d.light LED key chain. We cannot yet offer a tax deduction for your gift as we are still in the process of partnering with a nonprofit organization. Learn more at www.dlightdesign.org

d.light Board of Directors
We are very pleased to introduce two new members of our Board of Directors: Steve Hardgrave from Gray Matters Capital and Mr. Ulhas Yargop from Mahindra and Mahindra. Steve previously served as an investment manager at Omidyar Network and founded a microfinance organization in Mexico. He is now a program director at Gray Matters Capital. Mr. Yargop has been with Mahindra and Mahindra since 1992 and is now serving as President of the IT Sector. He also serves on the board of several other Mahindra Group companies. We feel very privileged to have such outstanding board members, and we look forward to working with them.

Story of the Month: Light and Education
Last February 2006, solar lighting systems were installed in the Dabkan village in Rajasthan (in northwest India) by the Grameen Surya Bijlee Foundation (GSBF), in cooperation with the Rajasthan Renewable Energy Commission (RREC) as part of a study to gauge the impact of solar lighting on rural communities. We thought that the results of the study were quite amazing, especially the impact on education for children. We've included an excerpt here:

By and the large, the most significant improvement experienced from the solar lighting systems has been the enhancement of educational opportunities for children. All households with school-going children cite a strong increase both in the amount of time children study each night, and in the children’s educational achievement. Children now study for an average of 1.5 hours each night, from essentially having not studied at home at all previously. As stated by Mr. Sharma, the village schoolteacher, quantifying the increase in educational achievement is impossible, as it is so dramatic that his curriculum has become significantly more advanced as a result. Currently, scores of 60 percent on exams earn a passing grade. According to Mr. Sharma, if he had administered these same exams previously, not a single student would have passed. At that time, he says, few students would retain much knowledge from one day to the next. He now estimates that on a daily basis, students retain an average of 70% of what was taught the day before, because of the present ability to do homework exercises in the evening.

Thank You to Brian Foster

The d.light team would like to extend a big THANK YOU to Brian Foster who has been working with us part-time as an electrical engineering guru for the last four months. Brian has done an incredible job building an automated test stand completely from scratch that has allowed us to run 24 hour testing on our circuit, LED and battery under different temperature and humidity conditions. This has been instrumental in our product development process. Brian is finishing up his EE PhD program at Stanford and will no longer be working with us. Brian, you will be greatly missed! The test stand, often confused with a glowing spaceship, is depicted below.