Lighting a Billion Lives is a global initiative to facilitate clean energy access and the delivery of last mile energy services for basic and productive use. The initiative enables energy poor communities to transition from traditional and inefficient energy sources to modern, more efficient and sustainable energy solutions. The initiative accelerates market development for clean energy technologies through knowledge sharing, capacity building and market seeding.

Effective responses to climate change require efforts by both the public and private sectors to develop and disseminate new environmentally sound technologies (ESTs) on a global scale, as well as to adapt them to local needs. However, due to a number of market failures and specific uncertainties, the spread of green technologies is less than optimal, which necessitates additional incentives. Based on a review of recent literature, the present Global Challenges