May 28, 2013

Mercy Corps in Timor-Leste

Campaigning, Research Post by

We created a co-design process and capacity building programme to help Mercy Corps build clean energy markets in Timor Leste


Timor-Leste is one of the poorest countries in the world, where approximately 65 percent of people do not have access to electricity. Most families in rural areas struggle with poor quality light and health problems related to dirty kerosene smoke. Households must spend as much as a third of their budget on kerosene - a significant financial drain on families and a major contributor to Timor-Leste's overall poverty cycle.

Mercy Corps asked good friends to help their Energy for All programme to build clean energy markets from the ground up and raise consumer awareness of solar energy products. We created a research and design framework that involved stakeholders throughout the process, allowing Mercy Corp to gain a deeper understanding of stakeholders needs, uncover new opportunities and increase the speed and effectiveness of creating new solutions.



We are convinced that campaigns and services work best when stakeholders are integrated in their research and design

We created a design framework and a toolkit of activities. We provided training for the programme manager and guided him through the whole project, frequently speaking over Skype to support him in Timor-Leste and help build a multi-disciplinary team of local stakeholders to run the project.

The Energia Solar logo

We created a research and design framework for Mercy Corps

The design process

Local stakeholders join the project team in Timor-Leste

The design process is made of six phases - researching the problem, observing user behaviour, defining the core problem we need to solve, generating ideas for new solutions, rapidly creating prototypes and testing them with users in the real world. This is an iterative process that lets the design team improve their ideas by testing them in the real world .

The design process

Understanding the problem

We guided the local design team through an extensive phase of interviews, ethnographic research and analysis. The design team looked at the whole 'user experience', from how families make purchasing decisions to studying the household's use of the product itself. By talking to villagers and observing their behaviour we discovered valuable insights that would shape the marketing, financing and delivery of solar energy products.

Group interviews Group interviews and workshops with villagers

The research uncovered key barriers to purchase - people either had no awareness of solar power or had negative experiences of using poor quality products already on the market. Unlike existing products, poor lighting and low performance were not an issue for the solar lamps that Mercy Corp was introducing. We realised that we any campaign would need to both explain the technology and build trust.



Energy from the eye of the sun

The project team's solution was to create a nation-wide 'trust mark' that can be found on all quality solar lamps in Timor-Leste. We provided visual design and technical support to the project team, who presented the designs to end-users and refined it based to their feedback. The logo is designed to be simple to reproduce, allowing retailers to easily stencil it on the side of their stores. The tag line ‘Enerjia hisu loro-matan’ translates as ‘Energy from the eye of the sun’, a first step in communicating the core benefit of free energy.

The Energia Solar logo

A trust mark for solar products

Good light, good life

We developed a national campaign to raise public awareness of solar technology based on the claim 'Naroman diak, moris diak' ('Good light, good life'). The campaign had to explain the core technology to a new audience and illustrate the benefits of the product.

The campaign was built around those human moments made possible by solar energy - women socialising and weaving together, children able to study in the evening and young men dancing to their mobile phones (which are, interestingly, mostly used as radio devices and can be charged by the solar products).

The Energia Solar logo Early prototypes for the campaign posters that we tested with potential customers

The Energia Solar logo One of the final campaign posters

The Energia Solar logo Weaving is a common past-time for women in the evening

These family moments were bought to life in billboards, posters, roadshow events, theatre productions, television and radio commercials. Mercy Corp established a highly successful ‘champion’ system of key village residents acting as door-to-door promotors of solar lighting, receiving incentives based on their referrals. Each of these channels were first prototyped, tested, refined and rolled-out across the whole country.


TV commercial

Local retailers are seeing good growth rates in all thirteen administrative districts and public awareness has risen sharply. The project was seen as a wide success inside Mercy Corps and has been nominated for an innovation award.

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