Green Empowerment

Since 1997, Green Empowerment (ge) has worked with in-country partners around the world to implement clean water and energy projects. Ge collaborates with indigenous peoples, rural communities, and local organizations in 12 countries to develop sustainable projects that improve health outcomes, build climate change resilience, advance gender equity, and lift families out of poverty. Water in 2022, ge primarily supported clean water work in 5 countries in latin america: colombia, peru, ecuador, bolivia, and nicaragua. These water projects not only meet the communities' basic needs to be healthy, but they also provide opportunity for economic development, improve attendance at schools, advance gender equity, and empower the communities to manage their own natural resources in climate-protecting ways. In latin america alone, we closed out a total of 22 wash related projects, supporting 51 communities. Together with partners, we completed new or improved water systems that helped 5,319 people gain access to clean water in their homes, with an additional 3,648 gaining access to improved sanitation facilities. These activities were accompanied by key training that will help sustain systems in the longer term, including: 1,509 people trained as community technicians to manage operations and maintenance of installed systems; 425 people trained in community organization and leadership (energy and wash committees) and 5,010 people trained in best practices in water, sanitation and hygiene.

Training and professional services ge strives to build lasting capacity by providing training, technical expertise, funding, and additional resources to all partner organizations and interested citizens in partner communities. We empower local leaders to identify, design, and implement sustainable projects that meet their self- identified economic, health, and environmental needs. By following our partners' lead, ge ensures the long-term economic and environmental sustainability of our projects. In 2022, we advanced our innovative technology tools with partners, which will enable the efficient use of renewable energy systems. Smart grids for small grids aims to develop open-source technology for more resilient, community-based renewable mini-grids. With our partners sibat and tonibung, we researched, developed, and tested our load management devices that enable remote monitoring and automatic control of appliances. The technology was confirmed viable in the field, allowing micro-hydro systems to manage fluctuations in energy use. Thanks to the work completed in 2022, this technology won the ieee empower a billion lives prize for automatic centric solutions in early 2023, which will provide financing for continued development and testing the technology at scale. The dream tool was used to conduct an energy needs assessment in 14 health facilities based in sierra leone and liberia, supporting our partner global health ministries. Using this tool, they are able to understand current gaps in electricity access in their facilities, project future electricity needs, establish the total investment cost to electrify and replace diesel generators, and prioritize four health facilities to receive funding for installation of solar systems.

Energy in 2022, ge continued work in malaysia to accelerate our efforts to reach over 200 unelectrified communities with renewable energy infrastructure in the next 10 years. The sabah energy roadmap project takes a collaborative approach to rural energy planning, by integrating indigenous knowledge and deep understanding of the local context with sophisticated energy modeling and policy recommendations.the sabah roadmap was recognized with the renewable energy markets asia awards in 2022 for an innovative approach to advanced modeling and implementation planning. Also in 2022, we worked to address the healthcare needs of refugees in the thai-myanmar border. With our partner border Green energy team (bget), we provided renewable energy to healthcare clinics in karen state, home to the karen people and other ethnic minorities targeted by the military government's ethnic cleansing efforts. The project supported the nonprofit karen department of health and welfare (kdhw) and their network serving people in karen state, and successfully installed 11 solar energy systems in 8 clinics, serving a total of 57 villages of 28,716 people (5,191 households). In latin america, ge supports both energy and water projects. An example from the peruvian amazon is in the community of bretana where a collective of local women developed a collaboration with 11 local fisherman associations representing 220 fishermen. In partnership with ea&s, we provided funding and technical designs to install a 20kw solar photovoltaic system that powers an ice plant producing 800kg of ice flake daily. This project creates new jobs for women in the local community and empowers the local fishing industry to improve revenue. In uganda, we worked with new partner medical teams international to assess and prioritize 54 health clinics that relied on costly and environmentally damaging diesel generators to offer healthcare to rural and indigenous communities. We were able to implement 3 solar + storage systems this year at nyumanzi, juru, and ayiri health centers that provide reliable, renewable energy to elevate the quality of healthcare for over 82,000 nearby community members.