In Bangladesh, a country on the front line of the climate crisis, there are at least 4 million solar panels—enough to serve more than 20 million people. Most of these are small-scale systems, running off individual dwellings or small businesses, and are a necessity in a country regularly hit by blackouts and buffeted by tropical storms. Around 2015, Sebastian Groh, the CEO and cofounder of SOLshare, had an idea: What if those houses with solar could share their electricity with those around them? With a team of local engineers, Groh built a small-scale peer-to-peer solar network—the first of its kind in the world.

“We built this peer-to-peer network, even though we didn’t know that this is what it was. And the New York Times picked it up, and the World Economic Forum: ‘The first peer-to-peer grid was built in a village in Bangladesh, not in San Francisco, New York, or London’,” Groh says. The reaction was of surprise—but to Groh, who had previously worked on energy solutions while at Stanford University, the SOLshare story could only have happened in Bangladesh. “When I tried to do this with the resources and the people at Stanford, it didn’t work. When I tried in Berlin, it didn’t work,” he says. “It only worked when we took it to the field, and had a local team, and we could iterate very quickly.”

Over the past decade or so, the tech world has been dominated by the hunt for “unicorns”—billion-dollar companies with vast scale and global reach. Most of those companies have focused around geographic hubs in the Global North: Silicon Valley, London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv. But when it comes to finding urgent solutions to climate change, this model may be inadequate.

“Maybe we don’t need to hunt for so many unicorns in the sustainability sphere. Maybe we would have a bigger and more inclusive impact if we had tens to hundreds of thousands of climate startups,” says Alejandro Crawford, one of Groh’s collaborators and the CEO and cofounder of the entrepreneurship platform RebelBase. “Then we’ll deal with the real problems, because they’re closest to them, and hence understand them much better.”

Climate entrepreneurs in the Global South face a challenging environment. In 2021, for every $1 that venture capital invested in Bangladesh, it was $4 in Nigeria, and $808 in the United States. “If we look at the allocations of financial resources, it is a very extreme skew not only towards what we call the West or Global North, but even to certain areas, like Silicon Valley,” Groh says. But it’s more than that: It’s also skills and community that help individuals with ideas find like-minded connections from which businesses grow.

There is huge will and energy dedicated towards tackling the climate crisis—just look at global protest movements—but often, potential entrepreneurs feel stifled from developing solutions. “How can we channel this massive energy into productive change, into projects, companies, business social enterprises?”

On RebelBase, Groh and Crawford provide a community of support to entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to tackling the climate crisis. Founded in 2018, the company now works with teams on five continents, providing guidance, connections, and training from seasoned entrepreneurs for startups who might lack the opportunities granted to those in the Global North. Crawford, for example, referred to Dr. Andrews Ayiku's work mentoring a company based in Accra, Ghana, that can make more sustainable charcoal from coconut waste; Groh is working with a startup in Dhaka that hopes to create alternative leather from jackfruit.

“If you look at the history of tech, we’ve gone from Hewlett and Packard in a one-car garage in an agricultural region that came to be known as Silicon Valley, to this idea that innovation needs to come through well-resourced global tech centres,” Crawford says. What we need instead is to “go back to making those one-car garages possible around the world, where there’s a space to experiment, [because] we’re going to need a lot more experiments.”

SOLshare has now expanded internationally. In Bangladesh, Groh is hoping to leverage another of the country’s unexpectedly sustainable sectors: Its estimated three million electric three-wheeled vehicles, which form a core part of numerous transport sectors. “95 percent of all electric vehicles in the world are two- or three-wheelers. [But] 90 percent of the time, we’re talking about cars, and it’s only 5 per cent of the pie.” In Bangladesh, SOLshare calculated that much of the grid’s peak load could be attributed to the charging of these three-wheelers. Instead of seeing these vehicles as a drain on the grid, SOLshare is enabling the grid to draw on these EVs as essentially portable batteries. Doing so can buffer as much as 30 percent of the grid’s load, increasing its reliability and lowering the risk of blackout, while giving drivers a supplementary source of revenue.

In 2022, SOLshare won the Zayed Sustainability Prize, the UAE’s pioneering global award for sustainability and humanitarianism. Established in 2008, the Prize awards $1 million to small businesses and non-profit organizations working on sustainable innovations in the categories of health, food, energy, water, and climate action.

Ahead of COP28, Groh addressed delegates, urging them to back entrepreneurs and companies in the Global South in the fight against climate change.

“What I like about the Prize is that there is a much stronger emphasis than others on the Global South,” Groh says. “And it does open doors.” At COP 28, he met Bangladesh’s climate minister, who is now endorsing the company’s vision.

For Groh and Crawford, the urgency of the climate crisis means that the change needs to be radical. But the good thing is that if anyone knows quite how urgent it is, it’s the entrepreneurs on the front line of the climate crisis, living the reality every day. “Whatever ranking you look at, Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change,” he says. “We have been dealing with this all along. So we’ve learned a thing or two.” Their experiences in the Global South could help drive the radical change the rest of the world needs—and fast.