According to World Bank data, 1 out of 6 people in the world do not have access to electricity in their homes. This is known as light inequality, and it affects more than 16 million Filipinos and more than 1.2 billion people around the world.
SALt, a startup funded by Ideaspace Foundation and founded by Aisa Mijeno and Raphael Mijeno, aims to address light inequality. According to its CEO Aisa Mijeno, the firm’s mission is to provide people with more sustainable and affordable alternative lighting.
The company is currently in what they call an optimization stage – the team is focused on improving the luminosity of their first model of lamp. Their goal here is to attain an acceptable brightness and satisfy a spectrum of functionalities the team has set for themselves. What drives them in perfecting the lamp is knowing that they will be able to bring it to thousands of Filipino households later this year.
Mijeno explained,Mass production will take its way second quarter of the year and hopefully we will be able to launch the product earlier third quarter.
She added that when the lamp is commercially released, it will follow a model similar to TOM’s Shoes.
So for every lamp you buy, we give one lamp to a family who needs it.
The technology powering SALt
SALt is unique in that it runs on salt water, which is one of the most abundant natural resources that the Philippines has as an archipelago country. Mijano said,
Developing a sustainable and cost effective lamp that runs on salt water means that the 16 Million Filipinos without access to electricity can use this natural resource around them to power up their lives.
Mijeno also shared that creating this lamp required a multidisciplinary approach and compared it to hacking a battery. All the components of a standard battery are contained inside a fastened casing, turning it into a limited piece of technology. Once all the energy is used up, you have to replace the whole thing. In reality, you only have to replace a part of the battery, then replenish the fluid to use it again.
The SALt lamp operates on this principle. Mijano further explained,
What we did with SALt is we gave people the option to drain out and replenish the fluid (saltwater) making the battery last much longer and the option to replace only the part that deteriorates over time (sacrificial anode).
The inspiration behind SALt
The idea for SALt came to Mijeno during her experiences as an NGO worker.
Having been able to travel around the Philippines, immersing in marginalized rural areas, these experiences inspired me to come up with a simple innovation that would hopefully ease these people’s financial stress.
However, the actual conceptualization of the technology did not take place until she traveled to Kalinga, where she witnessed how people had to endure long walks just to sustain their fuel-based lamps.
And this reality is the reason why we are encouraged to move forward. We all share the same vision. The very vision that I have for the neglected. And sharing the same vision means sharing the same motivation.
Though SALt is at its heart a business, they will measure their success by social impact – how many lives were changed just by using the lamp and the number of households making their technology a staple item. This goal is commendable, for it should never be enough to just get Filipinos into a home – each and every one of our citizens deserves a home that meets a basic standard of living, light included.
