The Solar Energy Foundation is a German charity that has wired 5500 homes in Rema Village, Ethiopa with 1,100 solar panels allowing residents lights in their huts, to play radios and to use other small electrical devices.
Only one percent of Ethiopa's rural residents have access to electricity necessitating the use of diesel generators and kerosene lamps. Clean solar power has social and health benefits, says Harald Schutzeichel, the founder and director of the Solar Energy Foundation. He says it allows medical clinics to keep vaccines for polio and other diseases refrigerated, fuels water pumps, and creates local jobs for electrical technicians, which the European energy group trains.
The project, which is the largest of its kind East Africa and cost roughly $450,000, should be duplicated in other impoverished parts of the continent. “We’re trying to sell this model,” he says. “This is the power equivalent of the cell phone.”
Cell phones not only offer opportunity through voice services but emerging technologies that bring Internet access to phones, bypassing the need for a computer for connecting to the World Wide Web. Computers are rare in much of the region due to poor wire-line infrastructure but a recent study found 97 percent of people in Tanzania said they could access a mobile phone, while only 28 percent could access a landline.
Research in India has found Internet connectivity can be key to improving the livelihood of rural poor by giving them access to information -- everything from crop prices to the legal protocol to acquiring tenure to land. Internet access can simplify interaction with government institutions for mundane tasks like acquiring an identity card as well as potentially increasing transparency and reducing corruption in transactions with officials.
Private sector investment, through vehicles such as mobile phones and solar panels, provides a model for eradicating poverty, building dignity and respect, encouraging entrepreneurship, and reducing dependency than more traditional aid programs.
The Rema Project’s main donor is Good Energies, an energy investment company, and in 2006 its chairman, Marcel Brenninkmeijer made a public pledge to Mr. Clinton to wire Rema and other villages. The promise was made at the Clinton Global Initiative, a yearly meeting of well-heeled donors, celebrities, and charities.
Mr. Clinton invited contributors to his foundation like Mr. Brenninkmeijer and members of the news media to get a firsthand look at his charitable work. The trip is widely seen as a way to raise publicity for the next Clinton Global Initiative meeting in September. Mr. Clinton’s foundation works worldwide but Africa is the primary beneficiary. Africa has 325 million people living on less than $1 a day needing aid. Clinton's group efforts have reduced the costs of medicines for two of the region’s biggest killers: HIV/AIDS and malaria.
Scottish philanthropist Tom Hunter gave $100 million to the foundation to build schools and health clinics, help coffee growers in Rwanda increase their production by 20 percent, and assist the country’s government to purchase and distribute 34,000 tons of fertilizer. In Africa and elsewhere, the foundation says they have helped 1.3 million people.Africa is a big country with many problems so transfers of technology, like solar power, hold great promise for raising the living standards of millions of people. Africa looks like the new land of opportunity when viewed as a huge beneficiary of technology transfer and things like the microloans offered by the Gameen Foundation.
source:by Ian Wilhelm
Rema Village, Ethiopia
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