Global Spotlights
Global Spotlights
Spotlight: Innovations in Education & Clean Energy Across the Globe
As we explore SDG 4 and SDG 7 this month, we highlight three initiatives, spanning Kenya, India, and Canada that are reshaping the way communities learn, innovate, and access clean energy. These examples remind us that sustainable development solutions emerge from local realities, cultural knowledge, and community-driven leadership.
Mukuru Clean Stoves (Kenya)
Global South Spotlight #1
In informal settlements across Kenya, families often rely on charcoal or kerosene for cooking, fuels that are expensive, unsafe, and highly polluting. These challenges disproportionately affect women and children, who face the highest exposure to harmful smoke.
Mukuru Clean Stoves, founded by Charlot Magayi, provides clean, affordable, energy-efficient cookstoves designed specifically for low-income households. Their stoves reduce emissions by up to 90%, lower daily fuel costs, and create safer home environments.
Crucially, Mukuru Clean Stoves integrates community education into its model: families receive training on clean energy use, fuel safety, environmental health, and long-term sustainability. Through a women-led distribution network, the initiative advances both SDG 7 (Clean Energy Access) and SDG 4 (Quality Education) demonstrating that clean-energy adoption thrives when paired with community-rooted learning.
Barefoot College (India)
Global South Spotlight #2
For over 50 years, Barefoot College in Rajasthan, India, has transformed rural education through its powerful and unconventional model: training illiterate and semi-literate women, many of them grandmothers to become solar engineers.
Women arrive from rural communities around the world and undergo hands-on, visual-based technical training. With no reliance on formal literacy, they learn to assemble, install, troubleshoot, and maintain solar lighting systems. When they return home, they electrify their villages, train others, and often become local clean-energy leaders.
Barefoot College exemplifies the intersection of SDG 4 (inclusive education) and SDG 7 (renewable energy access) while also advancing SDG 5 (gender equality). It reimagines who belongs in technical fields and demonstrates that community knowledge is a powerful driver of sustainable development.
Canada’s First Carbon-Neutral School (London, Ontario)
Global South Spotlight #3
In the Global North, schools are becoming living laboratories for sustainable innovation, and John Paul II Secondary School in London, Ontario stands out as a leading example.
Completed in 2021, the school integrated:
- 2,700 solar-covered carport panels generating 825 kW of clean energy
- A 2.2 MWh battery storage system
- Geothermal heating and cooling systems
These upgrades reduced greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 277 tonnes annually and cut electricity costs by 68%.
Beyond engineering, the school functions as a teaching tool. Students engage with real-time energy dashboards, sustainability-focused STEM activities, and curriculum modules that turn the building into a climate education resource. This model reflects how clean energy infrastructure can deepen learning, inspire student innovation, and embed sustainability into everyday school life, an integration of SDG 4 and SDG 7 in practice.
Across continents and contexts, these initiatives reveal a powerful truth: education and clean energy are mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development. They show that real progress does not emerge from technology alone, nor from knowledge alone, but from the synergy between the two, when communities have both the tools and the understanding needed to transform their futures.Â
In Nairobi, Mukuru Clean Stoves demonstrates how clean energy adoption becomes most effective when paired with community-based education and women’s leadership. The initiative shows that technical solutions are most impactful when they respond to local needs, cultural contexts, and safety considerations and when knowledge is shared through trusted community networks.
In rural India, Barefoot College flips traditional models of expertise on their head. By training women, many of them older, non-literate, and historically excluded from technical fields to become solar engineers, the initiative proves that access to education does not need to be limited by conventional literacy or credentials. This is SDG 4 in its most inclusive form. And by enabling these women to electrify their villages, Barefoot College advances SDG 7 in a way that centers dignity, empowerment, and intergenerational leadership.
Meanwhile, in the Global North, John Paul II Secondary School in Ontario illustrates how clean energy infrastructure can be woven directly into learning environments. Students not only study climate change in textbooks, they can observe it, measure it, and interact with it through the school’s solar arrays, geothermal systems, and energy dashboards. This approach transforms the school building itself into a pedagogical tool, bridging the gap between theory and lived experience.
Together, these examples underscore that achieving SDG 4 and SDG 7 is not solely a matter of expanding access, but also of determining who is empowered, whose knowledge is centered, and how communities are meaningfully included in the design and implementation of sustainable solutions. When clean energy systems are paired with meaningful, culturally grounded, and inclusive education, sustainable development becomes not only possible, but transformative.