Editor’s note: This article was first published in the Santa Barbara Independent here . Santa Barbara residents understand that power outages can be more than inconveniences. In recent years, our community has lived through wildfires, debris flows, severe storms, and public safety power shutoffs that disrupted daily life and, at times, placed lives at risk. Those experiences offer a glimpse into a reality faced far more frequently in many parts of the world, where unreliable electricity can jeopardize access to healthcare every day. Picture a woman in labor in the dark. A midwife trying to safely deliver a baby using only the light from a cell phone. An obstetrician struggling to continue care during an outage. A rural clinic unable to power an ultrasound machine, refrigerate medicines, or provide oxygen to patients when electricity fails. For women and girls, reliable light and electricity can mean the difference between danger and safety, isolation and connection.…