Our vision
We seek to create a thriving ecosystem of sustainable competitive businesses that deliver electricity to the billions at the base of the pyramid in order to improve their livelihood and productivity.
We expect the outcome of the IEEE Empower a Billion Lives competition to be a family of products and services that deliver electricity to the target customer group. This could be innovations in solar home systems, microgrids, and minigrids, or completely new approaches from what’s been done before.
About IEEE
The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world’s largest technical organization with the dedicated goal to foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.
Global Presence
More than 423,000 members in 160 countries and 1800 annual events worldwide
Technology leadership
Highly cited publications, conferences, standards, and professional and educational activities on engineering, computing, and technology information around the globe
Streamlined evaluation
For an average conference, 3,600 papers are submitted, and every paper is evaluated by at least 5 domain experts
Join us to empower a billion lives
Contributing to the IEEE Empower a Billion Lives competition makes it easy to make an impact.
Regional innovation
Large international corporations cannot penetrate such small and dispersed markets — small regional companies hold the solution. The competition elevates regional solutions by regional innovators.
Expert vetting
The solutions are vetted in multiple rounds by experts, they are ready to attract further investment right after the competition.
Crowdsourced creativity
A competition is an effective tool to crowdsource the creativity and technical expertise of the global IEEE community to solve one of the biggest contemporary challenges
Free market solutions
The competition brings innovation to the global electricity access sector, increases competition, results in better services and lower prices to the end-customer, the energy poor.
Greater leverage
The competition provides leverage for your investment by shifting risk to competitors. Prizes attract tremendous investments of time, human resources, and capital from motivated participants, multiplying the impact.
Become a sponsor
Find out how you can sponsor Empower A Billion Lives.