Motivation

This project was born out of an initial conversation with Nikhil Jaishinghani. Nikhil was a development officer for United States Agency for International Development (USAID), who worked in Nigeria. Shalom met Nikhil in 2006 when Nikhil and his team were preparing the visit of U.S. First Lady Laura Bush, to Shalom’s school in Abuja, Nigeria.  They have remained friends ever since. On occasions, Shalom would visit with Nikhil and they would talk about the causes and implications of poverty around the world and ways it could be addressed. In one of these conversations, Nikhil shared a story of his experience as a math teacher as a Peace Corps volunteer in South Asia. He told of how each night after the sun went down, he would light a kerosene lantern casting scarcely enough light to make out his room’s contents. As a result, he would often go to bed soon after sunset as he could no longer see. As a teacher living without electricity, Nikhil understood why the kids he taught lagged behind in their academics. They had no way to study and sometimes no way to do homework, during the period between school over and sundown. Shalom began to realize that a lack of electricity not only keeps people from learning, but affects their whole lives by locking them into a cycle of poverty.

Two years later in 2008, Shalom met Adamu and shared with him Nikhil’s dream of eliminating the poverty cycle through the production of low cost electricity. Adamu and Shalom remember these conversations with so much clarity because they are identical to the conditions they experienced while growing up in Nigeria. On coming to the United States, Shalom maintained contact with Nikhil. Little did he know, Nikhil had left USAID in Nigeria to go realize his dream of social service by setting up Mera Gao Micro Grid Power (MGP), a social enterprise which builds and operates rural lighting facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India. After several correspondences, Nikhil suggested Najafgar Bhoshal Vipauji (NBV) to Shalom narrating how similar of an experience its indigenes have with the Village he camped in during his Peace Corps volunteer work.   Nikhil presented how he would have gone to do work there but can’t because it would be un-resourceful to his company.