Power for the Poor – Affordable Solar Power

10 January 2012

Men setting up solar panels in rural villageSolar power can be distributed to poor households by 2020

Poor parts of the world can be supplied with affordable solar power by 2020 through a combination of cheap technology and services provided by cell phone companies, argues Carl Pope, chairman of the US grassroots organisation Sierra Club.

Progress in technology, finance and business models is overcoming traditional barriers to getting renewable power to poor villages, he says. “The combination of dirt-cheap solar, the cell-phone revolution, and mobile phone banking has changed everything”.

Conventional grid power and fossil fuels will not reach those who need it by 2030, according to Pope, and they are becoming more expensive. But cheaper and more sophisticated new technologies create an opportunity to pull together the resources needed to finance solar power for the poor.

Cell-phone towers around the world are being converted to hybrid renewable power sources, offering phone companies a “powerful motivation to get renewable power into rural areas, to get electricity to their customers, and to charge for electricity through their mobile phone payment systems.”

Examples of innovative business models include Zimbabwe’s Econet Power, which provides its cell-phone customers with solar power at US$1 a week with bills tied to a user’s cell phone account.

Providing the poor with off-grid renewable energy requires capital to buy solar power; business models that allow households to pay for what they use, making electricity less expensive than kerosene; and supply chains and distribution networks. “The money is on the table. It’s just on the wrong plates,” says Pope.

He calls for Rio+20 negotiations to embrace distributed solar power and replace kerosene, an expensive and dirty fuel. This would save 1.5 million lives every year (kerosene emits almost as much greenhouse gas pollution as the UK economy), raise income for the world’s poorest fifth by 25–30 per cent, and create demand for expanding solar systems. And it could result in half of the world relying on renewable power, says Pope.

Link to full article in Yale Environment 360

Link to SciDev.Net’s Spotlight on Solar power for the poor

The Rio+20 Nairobi Declaration

These are the main concerns of the Kenyan youths as per the  Kenyan Youth Strategy Meeting for Rio+20 Summit held in nairobi on the 13th and 14th October, 2011 at the UN complex, Gigiri.

Preamble

We, the delegates to the Kenyan Youth Strategy Meeting for Rio +20 at the United Nations Complex at Gigiri, Nairobi:

Acknowledge the African indigenous knowledge of the sacred value of the environment to biodiversity well-being.

Commit to promote innovations that will develop a green economy and promote the eradication of poverty.

Take note of the past declarations towards environmental sustainability both at the African and Global level, there is an urgent need for structural and infrastructural interventions in policy formulation, implementation and evaluation.

Recognize the current global environmental challenges, particularly climate change, which impact our common future and wellbeing, we commit ourselves to support of the following mechanisms:

  1. Good governance and transformative leadership.
  2. Promote Education, information exchange, communication and awareness
  3. Achieve sustainable agricultural practices to reduce hunger, starvation and enhance food security.
  4. Advocate for the development and implementation of sustainable development policies towards a Green Economy.
  5. Invest in and promote eco-friendly entrepreneurship and job creation.
  6. Attain sustainable green cities and villages.
  7. Promote public engagement and participation through culture and volunteerism.
  8. Promote Youth Development and capacity building

Download the Full Version of the Nairobi Declaration here: Nairobi Declaration 2

Call for Entries: Children and youth Environmental Contest

Thank you to all who contributed to making this a success. The competition is now closed.

Africa Environment is offering Kenya Primary and Secondary school children and youth aged 6 to 19 years the opportunity to participate in a bi-monthly environmental education campaign focusing on sustainable development and environmental social responsibility entitled “My Future,My Environment”.

Participants are invited to submit their entries from the 1st to 30th of October 2011, and every second month throughout the running period of the campaign. Entries that reach us after the closing date will not be considered even in the next session of the educational campaign since the running question will be different.

For more information on how to enter log on to www.africa-environment.info/my-future-my-environment

Environmental Education for Children and Youth

AFRICA ENVIRONMENT

MY FUTURE, MY ENVIRONMENT EDUCATIONAL CAMPAIGN

P.O Box 19499 – 00100

Nairobi.

http://Africa-Environment.info

 

Dear Children and Youths,

 

Wouldn’t you want to be appreciated every time you learn or do something new on your own for the good of the environment? Well, Africa Environment, an umbrella name for Educative environmental initiatives has launched a campaign, My Future, My Environment to reward children and youths as they discover more about their ecosystem.

 

The campaign, which will run once every two months starting 1st October 2011, aims at raising students’/pupils’ awareness of sustainable development and environmental conservation issues via self-study and practice. This we aspire to achieve through:

 

  • Disseminating information that promotes understanding environmental systems and environmental challenges.
  • Encouraging self-learning on environmental aspects through research amongst children and youth.
  • Influencing attitude change and promoting concern for the environment by means of incentives.
  • Impart skills to prevent and mitigate the environmental problems through encouraging participation in exercising acquired knowledge.

 

Pupils enrolled in Kenyan primary and secondary schools are qualified to enter the Educational contest in the three entry categories: Lower primary, upper primary and secondary/high school.

 

Campaign rules can be viewed at our website http://Africa-Environment.info/Rules.doc

Entrants are required to:

 

  • Fill in the entry form, downloadable from http://Africa-Environment.info/EntryForm.doc
  • Answer one question (found on the entry form)
  • Submit a painting or picture showcasing an issue in regards to the environment together with its brief description of not more than 300 words.

 

Winning entries will be awarded USD10 and USD15 for primary and secondary school entrants respectively. Winners in each session of the campaign will be featured in our website and contacted via phone and letter.

 

For more information view our website; http://Africa-Environment.info or write to us with your inquiries at EduCampaign@Africa-Environment.info

 

We look forward to working with you for the betterment of our environment.

Warm Regards,

Africa Environment Team

TECHNOLOGY: Making the most of mobiles

LONDON, 7 September 2011 (IRIN) – It is not often a technology guru will say, “Forget the internet!” but Ken Banks, founder of Kiwanja.net, advocates going back to basics – using mobile phones rather than the internet, and pretty basic phones at that.

While mobile phones are ubiquitous in Africa, the internet has nothing like the same penetration and is almost non-existent in rural areas. Says Banks: “For example, in Zimbabwe, there’s 2-3 percent internet penetration. If your amazing, whizzy mobile tool needs the internet, and you are looking to deploy it in Zimbabwe, you have lost 97 percent of people before you start.”

making the most of mobiles
Even the most basic mobile phones are able to use innovative tools

Dillon Dhanecha’s company, The Change Studio, was trying to distribute management tools and training through the internet, and admits it fell into exactly the trap Banks was describing. “We were developing short YouTube clips and so on, but I was in Rwanda a few weeks ago and trying to access our site from my Smartphone, and it just wasn’t happening.”

But there are plenty of options with even a not-very-smart phone: one of the pioneers was M-Pesa, designed as a tool for repaying microfinance loans. But Kenyans found all kinds of other uses; for instance, people afraid to carry large sums of cash while travelling would send it to themselves for collection at their destination. It was also key to the recent Kenyans for Kenya drought aid funding drive.

Tracking livestock

Another phone-based tool playing an important role in the drought-affected areas of East Africa is EpiCollect, developed by Imperial College, London, which allows the geospatial collation of data collected by mobile phone. Kenyan vets are using it for disease surveillance, monitoring outbreaks, treatments, vaccinations and animal deaths.

Even where there is no mobile-phone signal, they can record data by phone and store it until it can be transferred to a computer, producing an interactive map pinpointing where each observation has been made, with additional information about locality, even photographs, available at the click of a mouse.

Nick Short, of the NGO VetAid, has been greatly impressed by the possibilities, and the fact that ministries of agriculture and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) can now track what is happening in real time.

“When I worked in Botswana,” he says, “We had an outbreak in the northwest of a disease called CBPP. It took us about two-and-a-half months to hear the disease was in the country. By the time we got there about 20,000 cows had died; we ended up killing 300,000 cattle.”

Short is also hoping its use during the current drought will help leverage assistance, helping potential donors pinpoint exactly where their money will be going. “Just watching the BBC is not good enough,” he says. “This way people will actually see the animals they are benefiting.”

Banks has developed an SMS-based tool, Frontline SMS, which will work with even the simplest phones. By connecting a standard mobile phone to a laptop, data can be received or transmitted wherever a basic phone signal is available, without any need for 3G or an internet connection. It is freely available to any not-for-profit organization.

In Afghanistan it has been used to send out security alerts to field workers. It tracks drug availability in clinics across East Africa, and house demolitions in Zimbabwe. Civil society groups in Nigeria have used it to collate information from their election observers, and it is used by a company distributing agricultural pumps in Kenya and Tanzania to keep in touch with farmers. Specialized versions are being developed for health and educational sectors, for NGOs working in law and microfinance, and for community radio stations.

Nay-sayers

But while the developers may be entranced by their tools, some dissenting voices were raised at the 1 September meeting in London. A Ghanaian lawyer, who declined to be named, said: “I find this depressing. Just monitoring is not sufficient; monitoring is just collecting data while people die.”

Short disagreed: “Without these tools no one knows what is happening in remote areas, and if you don’t know what is happening, you can’t do anything about it… If there were an outbreak of disease, we wouldn’t know about it until it was too late, and the animals were already dead.”

Shewa Adeniji, director of a small NGO called Flourish International, which sponsors community clinics in Ghana, expressed wider concerns about Africa’s love-affair with the mobile phone. “There are glaring benefits, but it’s adding to poverty on the ground. You have people in Nigeria struggling to pay 1,000 naira for medical insurance, and yet they will buy 1,000 naira top-up for their phones. These are misplaced priorities and meanwhile the telecom companies are going to African countries to milk them of their money.”

Banks accepted there had been cases of people buying phone credit rather than food or sending their children to school but pointed out that building a transmission network, especially in rural areas, costs money. “If mobile phone [companies] didn’t make money, we wouldn’t have the network of coverage we have. And once the network is there, people can use it… The technology can be used to do both good and bad, and you can’t really control that. You can just as easily spread a hate message as a health message, but you just have to hope that people will use it in a positive way.”

eb/mw
Theme (s): Aid Policy, Early Warning, Food Security, Health & Nutrition,
[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
Source: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93675