The vision for the Carruthers Wheel project is to electrify rural Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, in a way that helps battle climate change. The market opportunity to be targeted is affordable, environmentally friendly hydropower supporting mini-grids of 10kW to 1MW. The project will create a local, African/Asian framework for the building and maintaining the Carruthers Hydro System, together with a method of mass manufacture that will reduce the price of the Carruthers Wheel while improving durability. The current state of the art is that this size of hydro mini-grid is unaffordable and will result in stranded technology, UN World Small Hydropower Development Report 2016, and Review on Sub-Saharan African small hydropower situation published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers–Energy. The key area of innovation in this project is creating a hydro-turbine that can be assembled on site by unskilled workers and maintained and repaired by semi-skilled tradespeople.