Pictured below is Georgina Teye. She sells plastic housewares -- baskets, bowls, mugs and the like -- at an outdoor market in Somanya, Ghana. She'd like to install solar-powered lanterns at her shop, which is also her home, so that she can remain open later and so that her three children can study at night.

I'm loaning her $100.

I made the loan through a startup nonprofit called Energy in Common.

I did so mostly to make a point -- that the problems of energy, climate change and poverty are all tied together. Getting clean energy to poor people is one of the best ways to help them to escape poverty, to combat global warming and to deal with food and water shortages and poor health as well.

This isn't easy for those of us in rich countries to grasp. We live in a world of cheap, abundant energy. Sure, you may nag your spouse or your kids to turn off the lights or turn down the thermostat. But when was the last time you thought about the energy needed to power your laptop, your TV, your stove or even your car? Probably the last time your power went out during a storm.

In the global south, and particularly in Africa and south Asia, energy is a daily worry for the more than 1.5 billion people who don't have access to electricity. Without safe and reliable energy, people can't grow crops beyond subsistence levels, operate a factory, get water to where it is needed, refrigerate food or drugs, or study at night.

Worse, some of the alternatives to clean energy for the poor -- cooking or heating by burning wood, dung, agricultural residues or coal, or using expensive, dirty kerosene lamps -- are not only bad for the planet, they're terrible for human health.

This set of problems led Hugh Whalan, a 26-year-old Australian, to start Energy in Common.

"Energy, he said, is at the base of just about any development outcome you'd want," he said. "Yet it isn't a Millenium Development Goal. We'd like to give energy a higher profile."

Hugh traveled widely in the global south -- he volunteered at refugee camp on the Sudanese border, helped victims of land mines in Cambodia, and taught English in Uganda -- before coming to the United States where he landed a job at a carbon finance company called Environmental Credit Corp. There, he met Scott Tudman, with whom he co-founded Energy In Common. They wanted to combine their knowledge of energy and carbon finance with their desire to bring clean energy to the poor.

"I wanted to make an impact in Africa," Hugh told me. "I was torn between development work and business."