11/08/2026
Grateful to the APNIC Foundation and ISIF Asia for featuring this work. 🙏
Peer-to-peer solar microgrids in the Rohingya camps of Cox's Bazar, bringing reliable electricity to households that had none.
With SOLbox, households do not just consume solar power. They trade it. Surplus from one rooftop flows to the neighbour who needs it, and both sides gain.
What that looks like on the ground: two microgrids interconnecting 50 households, around 300 people with stable access to clean electricity, sewing machines and vending machines turning power into income, and home-based enterprises led largely by women.
Children study after dark. Phones stay charged. Small businesses keep running.
Thank you also to NGO Forum for the partnership that made installation inside the camps possible, and to the 10 team members who were trained up along the way.
Read the full assessment: https://apnic.foundation/our-impact/assessing-financial-inclusivity-of-peer-to-peer-solar-microgrids-across-rohingya-refugee-camps/
For most of us, a day without electricity is an inconvenience. In the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, it is a daily reality with no end in sight. Children struggle to study after dark, phones cannot be charged reliably, cutting people off from information and communication, heat becomes harder to bear without fans and income-generating work stalls when there is no power to support it.
ISIF Asia grantee ME SOLshare Ltd. responded to the problem by installing two peer-to-peer solar microgrids connecting 50 households and reaching around 300 people. Using SOLbox, its IoT-enabled energy meter, households could not only use solar electricity but trade surplus power with their neighbours within the grid using credits for their own use or for resale.
The project also introduced productive-use appliances that supported income generation and community education.
Through ISIF Asia, the APNIC Foundation supports the power of frugal innovation in constrained environments thus enabling locally grounded ideas to develop into solutions that can improve safety, enable livelihoods, strengthen learning and create new forms of economic participation at the same time.
To learn more about the project, visit: https://apnic.foundation/our-impact/assessing-financial-inclusivity-of-peer-to-peer-solar-microgrids-across-rohingya-refugee-camps/
