Solar Sister: Training Women as Last-Mile Clean-Energy Entrepreneurs in East and West Africa

Solar Sister was founded in 2010 by former investment banker Katherine Lucey after meeting a Ugandan farmer struggling without reliable light. It runs a door-to-door direct-sales model, modelled on networks like Avon, in which local women are recruited, trained and given starter inventories of solar lanterns, phone chargers and clean cookstoves to sell in their own communities for commission income.

The first pilot was led by Evelyn Namara in rural Uganda; the model was subsequently extended to Nigeria and Tanzania, and later to further countries including South Sudan.

A 2016 qualitative impact assessment by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), using participatory PhotoVoice methods with entrepreneurs in Uganda, Nigeria and Tanzania, found the model had enabled roughly 2,000 women-run clean-energy businesses reaching more than 370,000 people with solar and cookstove products; entrepreneurs reported higher household income, greater household decision-making say, and safer, better-lit communities. The IEA later featured Solar Sister entrepreneurs in a case-study series.

Solar Sister's own later reporting claims substantially larger cumulative reach (several million people across more countries), but these aggregate figures are self-reported and not independently verified; the 2016 ICRW study itself was qualitative, describing entrepreneurs' lived experience rather than providing a controlled measurement of income gains or business survival rates.