“Tumeric, honey, lemon, ginger, water – that’s how you make dawa to get rid of a cold.” 

This advice comes from Jacinta, a small-share farmer based in Kabati Kenya who wakes up daily at 6am to tend to her livestock and crop farm of maize, cassava, mangoes, spinach and Sukumawiki. After her morning routine, sometime around 10am, she returns to her mud-built home and turns on her television to catch up on local news and learn from her favorite health channel (that’s where the dawa came from). After this, she’ll move on to supervising details on the construction of her new stone house, an upgrade made possible in part due to the savings she has amassed no longer paying for expensive paraffin fuel. Her grandchildren complete homework in the other room, moving through their workbooks without strain thanks to the overhead lighting that now fills the house. At the end of the day, Jacinta turns on her radio and sings along to her favorite Kikuyu Christian songs – her favorite one is a song of praise, a reflection on how far she has come. 

This is the transformative power of energy access — and all of it powered by the sun. ​​​​​​​

Jacinta’s journey with BioLite dates back to 2018, with her first acquiring a SolarHome 620 at her local micro-finance center. Her main motivation? To move away from her reliance on paraffin lamps: they were expensive, smoky, and despite being relegated to only one small room, it wafted a terrible odor throughout her entire home.

And not only was it expensive, it was dangerous, making it near impossible to leave the lamp unattended for fear of accident or fire, especially with young grandchildren around. With paraffin as her main energy source, days would end early, the home shutting down into complete darkness around 9pm. Ironically, these were the days was when Jacinta needed dawa the most, noting she frequently found herself catching colds from the paraffin fumes. 

When the BioLite SolarHome 620 came into her life, the change was instant: suddenly, multiple rooms could be used at once thanks to the multi-light setup, the harsh paraffin smell disappeared, and music and information flowed into the home through the included FM radio. Jacinta had taken that critical first step onto the energy ladder. 

At BioLite, our vision is not only to help our customers onto the Energy Ladder – a concept used to describe how access to increased energy capacity map to substantial improvements in quality of life – we want to help our customers move UP the Energy Ladder with higher power solutions that can bring even more benefits to the home. And this is exactly what happened with Jacinta, with the SolarHome 5000 being installed in her home in late 2019, enabling her to experience it in full during all of 2020. The larger power storage enables her to run her lights all day as well as power the included satellite television that brings news, education, and entertainment to the family. 

With a smile, Jacinta told our team that watching TV with her husband is now one of their favorite ways to spend time relaxing together after a long day of work. “We’re building our new house, we just bought two pigs, so much feels possible,” says Jacinta, “I’m very grateful for how far we have come and I am excited to watch everything around me grow.”