We proudly announce that Solar Sister has been nominated for the prestigious Earthshot Prize, the most challenging environmental prize in history. Its mission is to tackle the world’s biggest environmental problems in just ten years!
We’ve been very fortunate to be nominated by three of our supporters. Our good friends at Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, UNDP, and Lancaster University’s The Centre for Global Eco-Innovation have put Solar Sister forward in the category of ‘Clean Our Air’.
What is the Earthshot Prize?
The Earthshot Prize is a set of annual awards established by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and the Royal Foundation in 2020. It is a collaboration between high profile personalities such as Sir David Attenborough, Cate Blanchett, Indra Nooyi and organisations like Greenpeace, WWF, and the UN Environment Programme. The first award of its kind, it seeks to repair the planet over the next decade.
The prize aims to encourage and recognize innovative solutions to the world’s biggest environmental challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
The Earthshot Prize will award five yearly prizes over the next decade, each worth £1 million. The prize money will be awarded to individuals, teams, or organizations demonstrating significant progress in one of five categories called “Earthshots.” The five Earthshots are:
- Protect and restore nature
- Clean our air
- Revive our oceans
- Build a waste-free world
- Fix our climate
The prize aims to inspire a decade of action to achieve these ambitious goals and to create a more sustainable future for the planet.
In addition to the large grant, The Earthshot Prize offers the winning projects tailored support to upscale their ideas so the masses can adopt them.
Overall, the prize aims to change the current pessimism surrounding environmental issues into optimism by highlighting human resourcefulness and our capacity to bring about change through collective action. This is accomplished by incentivizing the changes needed and empowering organizations to carry them out.
Our Category: Clean Our Air
We’ve been nominated for the ‘Earthshot: ’Clean Our Air,’ which aims to:
‘By 2030, to ensure that everyone in the world breathes clean, healthy air – at world organization standard or better’.
Earthshot recognizes that millions of people die unnecessatily each year due toair pollution and that clean, healthy air is within our reach. We can eliminate the burning of fossil fuels, choosing 100% renewable energy for everyone – from big cities to rural villages and stop using and producing outdated means of transportation that emits toxic fumes.
Their goal is to create job opportunities in clean energy, to support businesses that remove more pollution from the air than they put into it and to ensure that all people can live and wrok without breathing in toxic air.
“The ‘Solar’ represents the renewable energy technology that will lead our energy transition to a sustainable future. The ‘Sister’ represents the essential role that women play in bringing that future into reality.” Katherine Lucey, Founder and CEO of Solar Sister
Solar Sister is committed to leading a global transformation as the first to tap into the power of women’s trust networks to deliver clean energy to the most underserved communities, opening the door to greater health, safety, education, and economic prosperity. We measure the impact of Solar Sister’s model on women’s families and communities via increased income, increased time for productive work, and reduced energy costs.
Solar Sister knows that women are uniquely positioned tp bring clean energy to millions in last-mile communities. Women are the primary household energy managers with powerful social networks. Business opportunities for women that provide access to gainful employment while addressing affordable, clean energy solutions can finally address these interlinked root causes of inequality, leading to economic empowerment for women and sustainable development capable of addressing the planet’s energy needs.
What’s next?
By being nominated, we have already cleared the first hurdle. The next step is for a panel of experts to evaluate all the applications and create a shortlist for each category of The Earthshot Prize. The Earthshot Prize Council, including people like Prince William and David Attenborough, will choose a winner from each shortlist!
Keep your fingers crossed for us over the weeks and months to come! In addition to being a fantastic accomplishment, being named one of the “50 solutions” would help provide us the resources to grow our network of women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa, reduce emissions of toxic air, creating healthier communities and mitigate carbon emissions.
We’ll make sure to update you on our progress.
In the meantime, we wanted to leave you with this inspirational Earthshot Prize film that showcases the Earthshot’s ‘Clean Our Air’ It describes the objectives of the prize while also outlining the core ideas underlying the Eco Brixs model.
That truly does give you hope that things can change and that we have the ability to clean up the air we all breathe for a healthier environment.