With population growth increasing there will come increasing demand on energy and on our planet’s finite energy resources. While energy use intensity has gone down in recent years, the total amount of energy used by the human population has risen significantly, as there are more people using energy-using goods and services. Along with increasing energy consumption, energy challenges exist across household, community and national levels. For example, energy access, storage, generation, transmission, distribution, clean cooking fuel availability, renewable and non-renewable energy supplies are just a few of the challenges facing our planet and the most vulnerable.

Executive Summary from World Vision Canada:

The United Nations’ Sustainable Goal #7 is to “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”. New technologies are emerging to deal with these challenges, renewable energy sources are on the rise, energy efficiency is being utilized more and more, policy innovations are being designed and implemented, and smart energy infrastructures are being created and used to better manage the energy supplies and resources we have.

Our Social Innovation Challenge aims to address these challenges.  By partnering with students and universities across Canada we aim to create market based solutions to address the worlds most challenging energy issues.  World Vision Canada has already invested into building a platform to solicit ideas.  We have implemented one challenge to date that focused on addressing the future of health and water for the most vulnerable. This brought forward some of the most innovative minds in Ontario Universities to collectively address this challenge that was put forward.  We have currently shortlisted 9 successful enterprises who are going through business management training and we will award two of these seed funding to test prototypes in September 2016.

We want to expand this success to look at a new development challenge in access to energy for the most vulnerable. We will follow the same process of partnering with Canadian Universities and incubators to solicit ideas.  While we do not need to invest into the development of the platform, we need financial support to provide enterprises with business management training and seed funding to test eventual winners of the market based prototypes. This grant will go towards supporting World Vision Canada in implementing this new energy challenge.

Measurable Outcomes:

1. Create 20 jobs and opportunities for youth in Canada and Developing Countries by December 2017
2. Identify and prototype 2 innovative sustainable energy solutions that address challenges of energy access by the world’s most vulnerable by December 2017