Smart Villages is an organisation that believes people in remote villages in the Global South deserve the same opportunities as everyone else. Unfortunately, many existing rural development methods are failing to achieve sufficient impact, and often fail entirely.

We hear a lot about the idea of Smart Cities, but less than half of the global population live in cities, with 79% of the global poor living in rural areas. Following 7 years of grass-roots research work, we developed the Smart Villages model for community development, designed to overcome these challenges. In partnership with local NGOs in the Global South, we have worked with rural communities to pilot our approach, innovate new technologies and business models, and demonstrate the difference that a community-centric model can achieve in creating sustainable and equitable long-term development outcomes, and make Smart Villages a reality.

The Challenge

Globally, there are still

• 770 million people without access to electricity
• 663 million who lack access to safe water
• 3 billion who lack safe, clean cooking facilities without harmful pollutants 

Until such communities have access to modern energy services, little progress can be made to develop their economies and improve their lives.

The Smart Villages Approach

Before the establishment of Smart Villages as a registered entity in 2017, the Smart Villages Initiative based in Oxford and Cambridge (UK) worked for over 7 years in six regions across the world to bring together the diverse set of players, generating new insights into energy access opportunities and barriers, new technologies, and why so many development projects fail, and how to tackle the challenges of village energy access for development.