WHL Consulting has started work on the Invisible Schoolhouse – an innovative educational program that is part of a wider collaboration between WHL Consulting and E+Co.
Solar panels are placed on a lodge in Nepal by E+Co investee Lotus Energy
An online university
The Invisible Schoolhouse program aims to create an online university for professional education, primarily focused on delivering practical courses to small and medium-sized business owners.
The ultimate vision is to create multiple “campuses” that will each house SME resources for key sectors in the developing world, such as Energy, Health, Agriculture, etc.
A hospitality campus
With generous support from USAID, Accenture and Citibank Foundation, E+Co has worked to launch an “Energy Campus” that focuses on clean energy entrepreneurship, and will now collaborate with WHL Consulting to launch a hospitality campus.
This partnership will leverage WHL’s world wide experience that has developed over the past 8 years servicing over 8,000 SME accommodation providers.
“WHL has proposed a truly innovative payment mechanism. We are experimenting to see whether that payment mechanism can be utilized by our entrepreneurs and their clients in the hospitality industry to bring renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements within reach for a wide swath of the sector. Our collaboration on e-learning naturally supports these types of transactions, providing lower-cost capacity building on both sides of the equation.”- Phil LaRocco, Founder and Former CEO, E+Co
Congratulations! It’s good to see small guest houses getting some serious support
Agree. This sounds like a great project.
Great news! I wish all the best to this incredible project!
This looks like a great project – and one that could have a great impact in my part of the world. There is currently a law about to be passed in Laos to prevent foreign investment in anything less than large scale hotels, as SME accommodation providers here are claiming they cannot compete with foreign owned competitors. A project like this could work to upskill the locally owned SME to compete with foreign-owned properties, rather than down-grading the overall quality of accommodation across the country in order to allow locally owned SME accommodation providers to compete.