Raghav Saboo (M.A. ’16) and Team Win Duke Hult Prize Pitch Contest

07 December 2015 9:12AM

Six startup teams last month pitched a panel of judges to represent Duke University at the upcoming Hult Prize Regional Finals on Mar. 12, 2016. Dhoop Energy, the brainchild of second-year master’s student Raghav Saboo (M.A. ’16), was the winning pitch.

Billed as the “planet’s largest student competition to solve the world’s toughest challenges,” the Hult Prize, in collaboration with the Clinton Global Initiative, this year challenged budding social entrepreneurs to create “sustainable, scalable, and fast-growing” companies that will double the income of people who reside in crowded urban spaces across the globe. The winning team will receive $1 million in seed capital.

Saboo joined fellow Duke students Starling Shan (M.S. Global Health ’16), Mikaela Falk (T ’16), and Vibhu Tewary (M.B.A. ’16) to form Dhoop Energy. Dhoop, which means “sunlight” in Hindi, proposes bringing a new energy solution to street vendors in India: a solar power unit that is a low-cost, compact, portable, versatile, and reliable alternative for kerosene lamps and diesel generators. Down the line, these units can power other devices, such as ozonators, mosquito-repellent light bulbs, and UV light water purifiers.

“The idea we came up with is something I had been thinking about for quite some time due to my travels throughout India. The energy poverty and lack of access to electricity is not just a rural problem. Even large cities with a developed electricity infrastructure see frequent outages,” Saboo said. “At the ground level, households and large parts of the informal economy free ride on the grid, which means that predicting load requirements is incredibly difficult for electric utility companies. This then results in electricity shortages.”

This problem particularly affects street vendors, who are unable to work after dark or store perishable food products, and women, who, as primary household purchasers, avoid shopping late at night because of safety concerns. One solution that many currently resort to is off-grid diesel-generated electricity, which is both costly and hazardous.

“This is where I knew a better solution has to exist, and for me that meant providing the urban poor with an off-grid solution that is cheap, reliable, and pollution-free,” Saboo said.

As part of its sustainable business model, Team Dhoop envisions hiring employees from urban areas — specifically women and those from marginalized communities — and training them to market and sell the product and provide maintenance services. Once established, the goal is to franchise the business.

"The other judges and I selected this team unanimously because we felt that it was the most promising innovation of those proposed by the teams," said Matthew Nash, managing director of social innovation and entrepreneurship at the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) Initiative, in an interview with WRAL TechWire. "It is both disruptive and scalable, with the potential for significant impact on the livelihood of vendors.

Read on to learn more about the origins of Team Dhoop and Saboo’s advice for aspiring social entrepreneurs.

How did you hear about this opportunity?

Since coming to Duke, I had been keeping an eye out for opportunities to work on something related to social entrepreneurship. I signed up to receive emails from Duke I&E, and that is how I heard about the Hult Prize@Duke competition. Initially I signed up out of interest, but when I read more about the competition and this year’s target, I felt compelled to submit an entry based on an idea that had been brewing in the back of my mind for quite some time. 

Your team is so diverse. How did you all meet each other, and how did the team get formed?

I met Vibhu previously and knew he had experience in India working in the international development sector, so I reached out to him as soon as I decided to enter the competition. Starling and Kayla knew each other from when they worked on the same organizing committees, and they both have great experience with global health and public policy. We got in touch with each other over e-mail as contestants looking to form a team, but it was our mutual interests and desire to make an impact that brought us all together.

How did your team share or split responsibilities? Was there something in particular for which you were responsible?

This is where our diverse backgrounds really helped us. Each person was not only able to offer a unique perspective on the solution but also able to develop different parts of the business plan in parallel. We played to each other’s strengths in developing the product design, the distribution strategy, the financials, the channels of impact, and the overall vision and mission statement. We didn’t have much time to put it all together with all of our various other commitments, but we made it work in the end!

I was in charge of conceiving and pricing the electricity generating solution and the payment system with constraints that I set. All of it needed to be achievable with largely off-the-shelf components and had to be significantly cheaper than diesel-generated electricity. The main challenge here was to put myself in a street vendor’s shoes and try to understand what the system needed to be able to do in order to be useful for them. Additionally, the payment system had to be convenient for street vendors whilst eliminating chances for corruption or free-riding.

How have you applied your economics skills/knowledge to this project? What skills in particular did you use?

My interest in economics stemmed from its application to energy and economic development. Thus, ideas from developmental economics have definitely shaped a lot of my approach to building this idea. I think the biggest influence, however, has been from the analogies I find from empirical evidence-based developmental policy work. A social enterprise is not a charity, so it needs to be financially sustainable, but at the same time there needs to be an account of the impact of its presence in the market. As organizations like Room to Read operate much like public companies, and they have shown in their annual reports that monitoring the tangible impacts of their work ensures that they stay on track and remain relevant.

What are you hoping to do after graduation, and how does Dhoop Energy potentially fit into these goals?

My goal has always been to push toward improving my skills in as many areas as I can. Working on Dhoop Energy is one of the ways in which I am working toward that goal. There is still a long way to go in the competition and a lot left for us to prove, but that is exactly what the team and I are most excited about. Our next step before the regional finals in March is to demonstrate a fully built system and its utility. Regardless of the outcome at regionals, we want to see the system implemented on the ground.

What advice would you give to other students who want to be involved in social entrepreneurship?

I think social entrepreneurship is an area with tremendous potential, and it is becoming increasingly popular. To a certain extent, there are many low-hanging fruits in terms of opportunities to really making a difference. When you look at the poorest of the population and understand their problems, you realize that you do not need to reinvent the wheel to come up with a solution. In most cases solutions already exist, but the problem is accessibility. This is also where things become exciting, as the challenge is to re-engineer current solutions to meet the needs of the poor whilst building a sustainable ecosystem around it.

Like any form of enterprise, you need to actually start building something before you are able to understand how to improve upon it. You have to be open to failure and be motivated by the idea of constantly iterating toward success. I look forward to reporting back after this journey to tell you what I learned!

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

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