The Use of Small-Scale Solar Power in Rural Africa

by Christopher Goodwin
(Las Cruces, NM USA)

The Use of Small-Scale Solar Power in Rural Africa The sun is always there and always free. Harnessing its power and converting it into usable electricity is not free and too often is out of the reach of impoverished people around the world who have no electricity, something that so many in more developed parts of the world take for granted.

But there are caring people out there trying to make a difference. Non-profit solar energy can be very profitable in terms of the health, wellness and education of rural, off-the-grid populations in Africa. Working primarily in Uganda and Rwanda, Solar Light for Africa (SLA) is a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) that raises funding in the United States in order to carry out solar projects in Africa.

After securing funding through private donations, government grants, and corporations and foundations, SLA organizes teams of volunteers (often high-school students), trains them, and sends them to rural communities in impoverished parts of Africa. Once there, these teams set to work providing light and electricity.

Most often, these teams of volunteers will carry out their work at a school or a clinic, two essential parts of any community or village that directly affects the well-being of its population. SLA’s teams install self-contained solar-energy units that provide electricity to schools, which in turn provide pupils with a place to study even after school hours. Studying at their non-electrified homes, students, if they study at all after the sun goes down, must resort to highly polluting and foul-smelling kerosene lamps.

If their school has electric lights (provided by the solar panels), the students can apply themselves to their studies in comfort. At rural health clinics, the impact of electricity is most keenly felt. One of the most crucial aspects is that the solar-panel-supplied electricity can power refrigeration.

Why is refrigeration so important? It is through refrigeration that many life-saving vaccines can be preserved. Add to that the obvious benefits of adequate light, and one can see how important electricity could be to the lives of a rural health clinic’s patients. The importance of having access to clean, uncontaminated and potable water cannot be overstated. The provision of safe drinking water is a further benefit that solar energy provides to impoverished communities.

In addition to providing the solar-panel units, SLA installs, in tandem with the solar panels, water-purification systems that run off the electricity SLA brings. Given that millions of preventable deaths occur every year, either directly or indirectly through lack of access to health care and clean water, solar energy has the potential to acutely and immediately benefit rural communities.

And further given that education is the cornerstone of prosperity, SLA’s work in wiring schools can immensely help poor rural villages pull themselves out of the grip imposed on them by poverty. Left unmentioned in all of this is one of the more obvious benefits that solar energy provides: its clean environmental footprint.

Many in the West and other industrialized parts of the world are struggling to confront global warming through means large and small. At the recent environmental conference in Bali, we saw how difficult it is for the world’s nations to come to any agreement to take concrete steps to combat global warming. Meanwhile, individuals in the United States and elsewhere try to affect change through the purchase of compact fluorescent light bulbs, for example, or by driving hybrid vehicles.

The sad truth is that as laudable as these efforts are, no number of compact fluorescent light bulbs, no number of hybrid vehicles, will begin to make a dent in the damage wrought by the enormous industrializing economies of countries such as China and India, which are using coal and emitting greenhouse gases at alarming rates. So let us be heartened to find a clean energy—solar energy—even in small pockets of the world, where its use can make such a profound positive impact.