The British Embassy-Beijing funded a solar electricity generating panel project implemented by fifteen Tibetan students and two student-project managers in the Tibetan Department of Qinghai Normal University. The project benefited 1,521 Tibetans living in Sichuan, Qinghai, and Gansu provinces. A British Embassy grant of 74,900RMB combined with a local contribution of 10,150RMB (100RMB per recipient unit--including nuns, monks, and laypeople) allowed for the purchase of a total of 101 solar panels. The two project managers volunteered hundreds of hours of their time to make this project such a success. Project aims were to: * Provide a safe source of non-flame-based lighting. * Help the environment by ending a need for batteries that no longer need to be disposed of and eliminating the need to burn wood and dung for lighting. * Provide clean air in rooms that are lit and thereby reduce the incidence of respiratory and eye ailments that are caused by smoke from flame-based lighting. * Increase disposable income by eliminating expenses for candles, flammable oils, batteries, flashlights/torches, etc. * Increase income by providing well-lit work conditions at night for the production of home-products, e.g., spun wool, handmade shoes, etc. * Improve students' school performance by providing lighting with which they can easily do homework in the evening. * Make women's lives easier by providing light with which they can safely cook at night, remove the need for women and girls to collect dung to burn for lighting, etc. * To allow people to spend more time together telling stories, joking, etc., rather than going to bed very early in darkness. * Provide conditions for elders and others to chant prayers and read scriptures at night. * Provide conditions for group entertainment activities at night. * Increase safety for livestock in nomad areas by lighting animal enclosures, thus limiting attacks from wolves. * Improve study conditions for students in schools without electricity. * Eliminate the risk of tents and wood houses being set on fire, as is the case with flame-based lighting. * Improve mother and infant health by provide lighting at night making it easier for women to give birth. * Increase the life of yak-hair tents by reducing exposure to smoke from flame-based lighting. * Provide nuns with more opportunity to read religious texts, thus increasing their knowledge of Buddhism. We sincerely thank the British Embassy for bringing a bright appropriate source of light to 1,521 Tibetans and for providing the opportunity to bring real, practical 'capacity building' opportunities to young Tibetans from across the Plateau to assist their local communities. In an era of multi-million dollar development projects with their concomitant plethora of highly-paid 'consultants' and 'experts' and very high administrative costs, we are encouraged that you fund projects such as these that reach far down into very impoverished, remote rural areas and bring direct and immediate benefit in ways that are technologically appropriate and environmentally friendly. We believe that this project, with zero administrative costs, is testimony to how powerful local people can be in solving their own problems.