Mark Ashton: Providing electricity for people living in poverty

Hi there. My name is Mark Ashton, and I am currently enrolled in the MSt Entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge. And my venture is called Mini Grids. Mini Grids is a for-profit social enterprise, which is designed to alleviate poverty for those individuals at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

I’m not sure if you know, you’ll probably recognise but there are over one billion people on the planet with absolutely no access to electricity of any sort and another one billion whose electricity access is very intermittent. Mini Grids’ mission to alleviate energy poverty is so that we can do this through productive renewable energy, and electricity is a poverty alleviating tool that helps individuals increase their access to education, improve their income as well as alleviate the home duties, especially for women in the world. Once they have access to electricity in their community, then they’re able to then use all the many different tools, et cetera, such as raising chickens, carpentry, welding, education. There are so many things that can be done whose first step is to provide electricity.

So our big, hairy goal is to provide electricity to one million people by 2030. It’s important in looking at starting a venture that you draw upon your background. My background includes over 30 years in the semiconductor industry, manufacturing and operations. I’ve been involved in two small firms and a variety of enormous billion dollar companies.

A key thing that attracted me to the University of Cambridge MSt Entrepreneurship programme is that the curriculum builds class upon class, term upon term to help you understand how to better succeed and how to better understand the best practises that are available in the world right now for such things as founding a company, how to use digital marketing, what are the best ways to recognise your market, and how to then dig down into the market and discover exactly what is the slice or niche that you’re targeting.