Grameen Shakti won an Ashden Gold Award in 2006 for providing photovoltaic solar-home-systems through affordable loans to 65,000 households in Bangladesh. It has since gone from strength to strength, winning an Ashden Oustanding Achievement award in 2008 and diversifying into providing clean cooking solutions, selling cheap, efficient cooking stoves and constructing biogas plants with trained technicians.

Anne Wheldon, our Senior Adviser, recently visited Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda where she spent two weeks doing assessments for our 2011 International Awards. During her travels, Anne also managed to catch up with some of our past winners, including KIST in Rwanda.

The Kigali Institute for Science and Technology (KIST) was the first on her itinerary. They were one of our earliest winners getting recognised for their work making and distributing bread ovens in 2001 and biogas plants in 2005. Anne met the head biogas technician who showed her KIST's recent work. She describes how they’ve expanded since 2001: