People growing up in rural India have few job opportunities, struggle to get a reliable income and have poor access to basic services such as renewable energy. With support of DOEN, Dharma Life trains (mainly) female entrepreneurs from villages in different regions in India to sell products such as solar lamps, clean cooking appliances and productive use renewable energy appliances.
Dharma Life selects the entrepreneurs, trains them in, among other things, sales techniques and information about the products, supplies the products and marketing materials and provides access to financing and pre-financing. The entrepreneurs also help other women join the workforce through Dharma Life’s Jaya platform for skilling.
Dharma Life has a dual mission with this: empowering women and offering people in remote areas access to clean energy. Certainly, in these remote areas of India, access to sustainable energy is not yet the norm: about 200 million people in rural areas do not have it. Dharma Life uses sustainable energy as a means to improve economic development, education and health care in these communities.
The DOEN Foundation has been supporting Dharma Life since 2018 and we are proud to announce that we are extending our support so that Dharma Life can further develop a new form of financing (Results Based Finance), achieve growth and train even more entrepreneurs. As a result, more people have access to sustainable energy.
To date, Dharma Life has mentored more than 17,000 entrepreneurs (of which 75% are women) who have sold more than 250,000 renewable energy products in 14 states of India. With this, Dharma Life has reached more than 12 million people.
