CBS News
Earthshot Prize finalist brightens lives as Prince William’s “dating service” for climate innovators seeks solutions
Kokotela, South Africa — Powering up is something most of us take for granted, but hundreds of millions of people across parts of Africa living without reliable access to electricity. An American company is working to change that, and their innovation is a contender for this year’s annual Earthshot Prize, an award handed out by Britain’s Prince William to highlight solutions to the climate crisis.
Like most 12-year-olds, Dimakatso Ngcobo isn’t a fan of household chores. She wasn’t shy about telling CBS News so as she scrubbed an old pot, a few plastic plates and two old peanut butter jars that she and her mom use as cups.
Last year, her mom couldn’t afford the rent at their home in Soweto, outside Johannesburg, so they were evicted. The mother and daughter walked to the community of Kokotela, a few miles further south, to buy a tiny dirt patch of land for $200. There, they put up a new one-room home made of metal sheeting.
Ngcobo told CBS News that while there’s no running water and no toilet, what she missed the most was electricity.
“It is a bit hard. We don’t have much. We don’t afford that much,” she said, adding on a more positive note: “At least the school nearby is OK, as I want to be a doctor one day.”
She was also grateful for her world getting just a little bit brighter recently, thanks to the U.S. company d.light, which was created by two co-founders who met at Stanford University’s school of design. The company has now connected more than 180 million people in 70 countries to a clean source of energy from solar power.
“We are very focused on making these products as affordable as possible, and the way we do that is by pay-as-you-go financing, where customers can pay 20 cents a day or 30 cents per day, similar to what they would spend on kerosene or diesel for the diesel generator,” said d.light co-founder Nedjip Tozun. “But instead of literally burning away that money, they can invest it into an asset that they are going to own that is going to deliver power for many years.”
D.light is one of the 15 finalists in the running for a 2024 Earthshot Prize. Winners will be chosen Wednesday in five categories: Protect and Restore Nature, Clean Our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World and Fix our Climate. The winner in each category will be awarded 1 million U.K. pounds, or about $1.3 million, intended to help scale-up their respective projects.
William, the Prince of Wales and future British monarch, has said he took inspiration from President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “Moonshot” challenge to land a man on the moon within 10 years when he created the Earthshot Prize four years ago with the ambition of finding and elevating innovative global climate solutions. The Earthshot initiative’s ambitious goal since it launched has been to repair the planet within 10 years.
The Earthshot award ceremony has come to the African continent for the first time this year, with Cape Town in South Africa playing host.
Delegates at the Earthshot awards in Cape Town told CBS News ahead of Tuesday’s U.S. national election that they’ve been disappointed that climate change didn’t emerge as a central theme in the presidential race, and they worry it could fall even further from the focus of U.S. policy conversation.
New Yorker Shantha Bloemen, CEO of Mobility for Africa, a start-up that provides green mobility services to rural women in Africa using custom-built electric tricycles and bespoke solar powered batteries, was nominated for an award this year but didn’t make the finalist list. She said she was still hoping to find partners in Cape Town this week to help her scale up her company’s operations.
“We need urgent action and strong political leadership to unlock the financing to combat this crisis,” she told CBS News. “There are many of us with proven solutions to mitigate the worst impact on those living on the front line of the crisis, but without strong U.S. political leadership, it will be difficult to unlock the finance needed to scale quickly to succeed. Time is not on our side.”
Prince William acknowledged the networking aspect of the prize initiative Tuesday at an event in Cape Town. Panel host Wanjira Mathia teased the British royal as he sat for a panel discussion, calling the prize “a large dating service to bring together climate innovators.”
“The prize is about visibility, but it’s also about scale,” he said. “What we hear a lot from innovators is, ‘I have a solution and no idea how to scale,’ and businesses and leaders who say, ‘I have money but don’t know where to put it.’ So, that’s where we created a launchpad, which is a dating service which matches the funder with the solution, and vice versa. And I think this collaboration is key — if you put all of this into one melting pot, then sparks will fly.”
“It’s wonderful to see those many brilliant minds and changemakers in a room,” he said, addressing the audience.
Back in Kokotela, south of Johannesburg, Muriel Nobela can now power her TV, radio and lights thanks to a d.light solar panel on her roof. The panel feeds electricity to an outside light and to a storage battery inside her home, and it all costs her just over $250, which she’s paying off in small monthly instalments.
Her neighbor Portia Msomi had always been forced to rely on gas to cook and candles for light in the evenings. Now, it’s just a flip of a switch.
“Aha!” said Portia, giggling as she hit her new d.light switch to illuminate her home. “You see, isn’t it wonderful!”
Tozun told CBS News it’s that kind of reaction that drives d.light’s work.
“The name of our company is d.light, and that is the emotion that gets us really excited to see in our customers,” he said, adding: “There are 2 billion people in the world who have unreliable electricity access, and about 750 million with no access to electricity at all, our goal is to transform the lives of one billion people by 2030.”
Portia takes a lot of pride in her new solar system. With a huge amount of effort she climbed onto a large trunk to stretch her hand onto her metal roof to grab her solar panel and clean it meticulously. She told CBS News it took her only four months to pay off the $150 cost of the system.
She pointed to various neighbors’ homes that had burned down in accidents involving paraffin and candle fires.
“We are safe now, and have light all the time,” she said.
Light and safety are important for young Dimakatso Ngcobo, too, but the 12-year-old told CBS News that being connected was one of the biggest benefits of clean power in her home. She can now indulge in her favorite activity: scrolling through TikTok and Instagram.
“And I love TV,” she added. “I really love cartoons.”
Her infectious laugh also helped to light up the room.
“I feel happy now,” she said. “We don’t have much, butI can watch TikTok and dream about my future.”
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Fact checking Election Day 2024 claims about voter fraud, ballot counting and more
Throughout Election Day and night, CBS News’ Confirmed team will be fact checking reports of threats around voting today, voter fraud, election hacking, and more as the nation votes and waits to see whether Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States., CBS News’ full coverage of the election is here.
False: Elon Musk claimed Google intentionally manipulating search results in favor of Harris
X owner Elon Musk posted, then deleted, a screen recording comparing the Google searches. The post reached over 2.5 million views before its removal, with other posts garnering thousands of views.
Details: Google said searches for “where to vote for Harris” yielded a polling location map because Harris is also the name of a county in Texas, not because of bias for the Democratic candidate.
Searching for “where to vote for Trump” returned news articles and standard search results, while “where to vote for Vance” produced a similar polling locations map because Vance is the name of a county in North Carolina.
Google adjusted its algorithm Tuesday to prevent candidate-related queries from returning polling maps. Google trends data show that searching “where to vote” is a much more common query than searching where to vote for either Trump or Harris.
By Julia Ingram and Layla Ferris
False: Social media posts claim Milwaukee mayor, a Democrat, said the city’s votes would not be counted on election night
On X, users claimed that the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee said at a news conference that Milwaukee would not be counting ballots tonight.
Details: Votes in Milwaukee will be tabulated tonight despite posts on the social media platform X that have pushed a false claim that Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said votes in the city won’t be counted on election night.
In reality, vote counting started Tuesday morning and will continue late into Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning at the city’s so-called “central count” location, according to Johnson’s communications director, Jeff Fleming.
“They’ve already started tabulating, and had tabulated thousands of ballots by this afternoon,” Fleming said. “The vote totals exceeded our original projections, so the workload at central count is higher than expected.”
Milwaukee’s votes can take longer to count for several reasons, Barry Burden, Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center, said.
“It’s the biggest city, and it has the most ballots, and it also counts absentee ballots at a central location,” Burden said. “That’ll be after midnight, 1 (a.m.) or 2 a.m.”
The city’s more than 200 election workers started counting votes at 9 a.m. Tuesday morning, Fleming said. They’ll continue the tabulation overnight, and ballots will be delivered to county clerks either the next day or the day after, depending on local rules.
By Chris Hacker
Spreadsheet error corrected: GOP U.S. House candidate says Harris County, Texas, early vote results showed big drops and spikes in early voting
U.S. House candidate Caroline Kane, a Republican running in Texas’ 7th District, posted on X Monday that Harris County’s early vote results showed significant drops and spikes in the number of early voters for several voting locations between Sunday and Monday, which should not be possible.
Details: Election officials said a misaligned spreadsheet caused the publicly reported early vote totals in Harris County to appear incorrectly. Local officials have corrected the document posted online by Kane. They noted the spreadsheet was labeled “unofficial” and said the error would not impact the official vote tally.
In a statement, the Office of the Harris County Clerk said, “In the process of updating the daily record of early vote totals for two vote centers (Baytown Community Center and Mission Bend Center), the formatting of the spreadsheet inadvertently misaligned, causing cells to shift and reflect incorrect numbers for other locations. Our office is aware and is actively working to correct the report.”
“I assure you that every vote that was cast will be accurately tallied,” the statement from the clerk’s office concluded.
By Jui Sarwate
Software malfunction prevented some voters from scanning ballots in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Voting hours extended to 10 p.m. in the county.
Details: Local courts have extended voting hours from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. in Cambria County, Pennsylvania after local officials said a “software malfunction” prevented voters from scanning their ballots early Tuesday morning.
Voters are using paper ballots as technicians review the issue.
“All votes will be counted and we continue to encourage everyone to vote,” the county commissioner’s office said in a press release.
According to the county’s petition to extend voting hours, the malfunction “caused voter confusion, long lines of voters, and many individuals left the polling locations without casting a ballot.
“The Pennsylvania Department of State said it is in contact with Cambria County and is “committed to ensuring a free, fair, safe, and secure election.”
Cambria County, located in southwestern Pennsylvania, has a population of approximately 131,000. Trump won the county 68% to 31% in 2020, and he won by a similar margin in 2016.
By Steve Reilly, Julia Ingram, Layla Ferris
False: Non-citizens encouraged to vote in Philadelphia
Conservative commentator James O’Keefe claimed non-citizens are being encouraged to vote in Philadelphia.
Details: Philadelphia officials said allegations by commentator James O’Keefe that non-citizens are being encouraged to vote are incorrect. O’Keefe posted a new video on Monday claiming Election Clerk Milton Jamerson and Ceiba, a local non-profit, advised voting with an ITIN number, regardless of citizenship.
The video received 1.6 million views on X as of Tuesday, and was reposted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who said it was “the smoking gun of attempted election theft.”
Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein said the report was incorrect and non-citizens are not eligible to vote in Philadelphia. ITINs are for tax purposes and not linked to voting eligibility. Ceiba called O’Keefe’s claims “unfounded and based on harmful stereotypes.”
By Joanne Stocker and Emmet Lyons
CBS News
Sen. Laphonza Butler on Harris campaign on Election Day 2024
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