Solar Serve

Designs, manufactures, trades and installs equipment using renewable energy.
2013 SEED Low Carbon Award; IKI BMU
Clean Energy
Quảng Nam
Viet Nam

Solar Serve offers efficient alternatives to traditional cookstoves. The clean cookstoves use significantly less coal or biomass than their traditional counterparts, and the solar cookstoves produce zero emissions. Trained staff members sell the products directly to local communities. The target groups for the products are urban and rural households who use cookstoves on a daily basis. Users benefit from reduced costs and a positive impact on their health.

Eco-Inclusive Impacts
Solar Serve specifically targets poor communities and areas of serious deforestation, helping them to change their habits of cutting down trees for traditional firewood, so reducing air pollution and bringing practical economic benefits and healthy improvement to the population. 
  • Training local community members to become trainers (there are 55 at present) and training salespeople in marketing.
  • Raising awareness about the socio-economic advantages of using resource-efficient cookstoves in urban and rural communities.
  • Protecting local forests by cutting the need for firewood by 50 % per household and saving 1.1 tons of carbon emissions per solar or clean cookstove each year.
  • Improving health by reducing indoor and outdoor air pollution, as well as security.
  • Enhancing customer choice by providing cost-efficient alternatives to traditional cookstoves – the savings over five years are around USD 500 for solar cookers and USD 900 for clean cookers.
  • Providing employment for 10 female entrepreneurs (plan is 34 by 2014).

Partners

Solar Serve designs, manufactures, trades and installs equipment using renewable energy, such as solar devices, clean cookers and fuels. Solar Serve specifically targets poor communities and people in areas of serious deforestation, helping them to change their habits of cutting down trees for traditional firewood, so reducing air pollution and bringing practical economic benefits and healthy improvement to the population. 

Solar Serve manages the marketing, manufacture and distribution of the clean cookstoves and solar cookstoves, as well as training salespeople. 

The Centre for Social Initiatives Promotion (CSIP) provides know-how and assistance in business development and network.ing. It provided seed funding of USD 20,000.

Thien Phuc Nguyen helps broaden Solar Serve’s distribution network by promoting and distributing the products through its own distribution channels.