Energy For The People

Hugh Whalan

April 9, 2010

Welcome to the EIC Blog. We're happy to be off and running.

Welcome to the EIC blog. We have been in private testing for the last 4 months and are ready to show ourselves to the general public! It’s been over a year since Scott and I first came up with the idea for EIC. We owe our progress to lots of people, and organizations who have helped us with all sorts of things. I won’t list them right now, because I wanted to share some core components of our business with you – things that define us as an organization:

Each loan addresses poverty and climate change. That’s pretty good don’t you think! Each single loan provided through EIC, helps an entrepreneur take a measureable step towards alleviating poverty, towards reducing emissions and preventing deforestation, and towards improving the air quality and reducing fire hazards for their family.

We aim to be a catalyst for growth in energy lending. To truly achieve massive change, we believe we need to show others the financial value of delivering energy to the poor. We want to showcase the most effective ways to expand energy access, and importantly, the ones which have the highest chance of self replicating (ie. they are profitable!). As a non-profit, it makes it easier for us to collaborate with companies, to disseminate information on profitable opportunities and importantly, to educate the market. In doing this, we believe we have a shot, a great shot, at being a true catalyst for the market of energy.

We want to be big, really big. Why, you ask? We need to be to have any chance of making a dent in the problem we are tackling! There are 2.4 billion people lacking access to modern energy services today. This is projected to grow to nearly 2.7 billion by 2030.

At EIC we don’t feel that being a business and being a non-profit are mutually exclusive. We have a heavy emphasis on becoming a self funding entity through revenue generation as opposed to charitable donations. Our aim is to focus on our core business of facilitating your energy loans to the poor, not on asking for donations from you or employing people solely for the purpose of applying for grants. We think that’s what you want, and it’s certainly what we want.

And of course, we wouldn’t be able to do any of this without our most important participants – our lenders. You are the ones truly making the difference to our energy entrepreneurs. I am looking forward to getting to know you as we grow.