Light Up The World Foundation

Dr. Dave Irvine-Halliday, a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Calgary, had in 1997 the vision to use LED lighting to bring practical, economical, and environmentally safe lighting to the developing world.

Dr. Irvine-Halliday envisioned LUTW during his sabbatical in Nepal where he was helping the Institute of Engineering, University of Tribhuvan, Kathmandu develop its electrical engineering degree programme.

While trekking the Annapurna Circuit he visited local villages and was struck by the poor conditions of the people. Most of them were relying on kerosene lamps which produced little light and filled the homes with dangerous smoke. As the annual income of the Nepalese villagers averaged $200 USD Dave realized that there was a great need for simple, safe, healthy, affordable and rugged lighting.

Dave, who had been working with LEDs for more than two decades, spent most of 1997 and 1998 trying to make an acceptable white light from various combinations of colored indicator LEDs. He made white light but it was simply not bright enough to be of any practical use in the developing world. Around the end of 1998 Dave discovered that Nichia, a Japanese company, had invented the White LED a few years earlier and he immediately requested that they send him samples. When he and his technician, John Shelley, lit their very first White LED it was most definitely the “Eureka” moment – “Good God John, a child could read by the light of a single diode”.

In 1999 Dave and his wife Jenny tested their prototype WLED lamps in a number of Nepali villages and the response from the villagers was so absolutely positive that they knew what they’d be doing with the rest of their lives.

In 2000, Dave, Jenny and their son Gregor returned to Kathmandu and with the assistance of their Nepali friend, Muni Raj Upadhyaya, lit the first three villages in the world with WLED lighting, thus laying the pioneering origins for the development of LUTW into a global lighting initiative.

Together with Ken Robertson, Roy Moore and Pauline Cummings the Light Up The World Foundation was legally established in 2002. From a singular idea born among the poor, LUTW has grown into a global humanitarian organization reaching out to even the remotest areas of the world.