Faroukh lives miles from the nearest mains power. His mobile, like the lights in his home and in his wife’s sewing workshop, are charged by solar electricity, courtesy of a small photovoltaic (PV) panel attached to the roof of his house. It was sold to him by Grameen Shakti (‘village energy’), an offshoot of the hugely successful Grameen Bank.

Thanks to a simple micro-credit system, even poor families like Faroukh’s can afford the panels. Savings on the smoky, unreliable kerosene lanterns easily cover the monthly repayments. The solar lamps mean Faroukh’s family can work into the evenings, more than doubling their income, while the phone plugs them into the wider economy in a way that would have been unimaginable ten years ago.

Grameen Shakti – winner of an outstanding achievement prize in the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy – has now installed nearly 200,000 solar home systems across Bangladesh, and confidently expects to hit one million by 2015. With over 30 million families marooned ‘off grid’ in Bangladesh alone, the potential for future growth is enormous.