One woman told a story of how much safer she felt at night. This was a tropical area with a lot of snakes, and if she ever got up in the dark, she was afraid she would be bitten. With a simple solar light, that risk was almost entirely gone.
“That was really profound because I had not seen electricity in that context,” Misra said. “That stayed with me.”
Misra, the co-founder of Solar Sister, which empowers African women to become entrepreneurs and sell solar lights and chargers in their communities, grew up in the urban area of Delhi, India. She had access to power most of the time, but as India’s population and economy grew, she experienced power cuts, reading by candlelight, and not being able to study while she was younger. As she got older, her life became “increasingly more electrified,” she said.
Her father is a mechanical engineer and her mother a doctor, so Misra was interested in science and technology from a young age. But from the time she was in high school, Misra also had a growing passion for economics. She split her studies between physics and economics for some time, but decided to pursue science through college.
Then, she switched back to business and earned her master’s in business economics from the University of Delhi. That’s where she really started to appreciate the business side of technology and science — how economies change with evolving tech, and vice versa. While doing her master’s, Misra got an internship with one of the biggest advertising firms in Delhi, doing consumer behavior research. A large part of her job was to find out what drove people to purchase Pizza Hut pizzas. After a while, the luster of that coveted internship wore off.
NOTE CREDIT: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lyndseygilpin/2015/11/18/meet-neha-misra-the-avon-lady-of-solar-power/