A key strategy for the Solar Lamp project is to find a development and manufacturing partner in China, who would finish the design per my specification and do the manufacturing. My former job had me working with a Chinese company called Bojay located in Zhuhai, Guangdong, who built our test equipment hardware - lot's of physically large metal boxes filled with electronics that talked via precision mechanical interfaces. The bottom line is to be able to do that, a company has to have a wide range of capability. Over the last 5 years or so, I had them do millions of dollars worth of equipment for my last employer; and have built a good relationship with this hard working and honest company. Bojay is actually a congomerate of several different businesses.
Tonight a couple of their top managers were in the US so I had dinner with them. I presented to them some slides on the Evergreen Education Foundation's mission and history. A few weeks ago, Jeffrey (another Evergreen volunteer) had brought the Request-For-Proposal to them; and I was able to discuss it further with them. As it turns out, Bojay is starting a small development business and believes the solar lamp project would be good to get their new engineers some experience. After our discussion, The managers said they would propose this project to their new company.
This is exactly the type of win-win that I was hoping to achieve - in this case Evergreen will get the solar lamp project manufactured within a charity organization's low budget; and in return our Chinese partner will have a real work project to train their new engineers without the high pressure of the for-profit world.
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