Buying and installing solar panels costs money - but once they're in place, the power is free.

That's turning out to be handy in rural Kenya as families hit by job losses amid the coronavirus pandemic manage not only to keep the lights on - even without cash coming in - but also make a little money selling excess power.

"My neighbours who are experiencing blackouts now come to me so that I can charge their phones for them for a fee," Lucyline Wanja, an unemployed farm hand in central Kenya, told correspondent Kagondu Njagi.

"There is no money out there. I do not know what I could be using to buy kerosene if I had not installed this solar unit," she said.

Solar power is not an unqualified success, however. Some people, including Wanja, buy their systems with small, regular payments - and are now struggling to make those.

That raises questions about the financial sturdiness of efforts to get clean power to millions without it, and make it affordable for all.

But there's no question ever-improving access to solar energy, particularly for the poorest, is solving a host of problems.

In the east Indian state of Jharkhand, where most people are rural and many live in poverty, solar-powered irrigation is helping tribal communities keep a harvest coming in, despite increasingly irregular rainfall.

What does that mean? Fewer younger people leaving home to find work.

"Many of us are now cultivating cauliflowers that fetch a good price in the market," Mangra Bhengra, a young farmer who maintains the village's solar pump, told correspondent Soumya Sarkar.

"Who needs to migrate if you can make money in the village?"

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