Not long ago, dusk was a time of unease for the people of Magadi, a village in Kenya’s Kajiado County.
As the sun set, farmers began worrying about their cattle, easy prey for hyenas and leopards. Children lit fires to finish their schoolwork, filling homes with smoke.
Now as darkness falls, lights flick on across this sleepy hamlet, thanks to the efforts of more than 200 Masai women at the front line of a solar power revolution.
Illustration: Y. C. Chen
The women, trained in solar panel installation, use donkeys to haul their solar wares from home to home in the remote region, giving families their first access to clean and reliable power.
“For us, the impact of solar technology is unparalleled,” said Jackline Naiputa, who heads the Osopuko-Edonyinap group, one of the five women’s groups leading the alternative energy charge in the area.
Renewable energy developer Green Energy Africa provides the group with solar products — including solar panels, lights and small rechargeable batteries — at a discount. The women sell the products at a profit of around 300 Kenyan shillings (US$3.12) each, which goes into the group’s account to buy more stock.
Naiputa, who lost 10 goats to wild cats last year, said her teenage son used to spend cold nights in the cattle enclosure to guard their herd. Now, with solar lamps hanging around her homestead, Naiputa and her four children can sleep soundly in the warmth of their home.
“The light scares the hyenas away, so we don’t have to worry about losing our animals at night,” she said.
The Women and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy Project, an initiative of Green Energy Africa, aims to turn Kajiado County to solar power by training women as solar installers and encouraging them to market the clean energy concept to fellow pastoralists.
The solar energy drive began in November last year, and so far about 2,000 households in the country have adopted solar technology. Just seven months into the effort, the area has jumped from zero solar energy consumption in 2006, according to estimates by the government’s Arid Land Resource Management Project, to 20 percent today, energy experts said.
Compared with kerosene and firewood, the cost, convenience, and health benefits of solar energy are proving hard to resist.
“The nearest market where one can charge a cellphone or buy kerosene is 15km away, and it is only held one day a week,” Naiputa said.
Before going solar, her household used to spend 40 shillings per day on kerosene and over 100 shillings per week charging the two family cellphones.
As well as saving villagers money, the switch to solar could help slow down the destruction of Kajiado County’s trees, which now cover just 1 percent of the area’s land, according to Kenya’s National Environmental Management Authority.
In addition, as more villagers choose clean solar energy over wood and coal to light and heat their homes, fewer will suffer the effects of inhaling the smoke that comes with their nightly fires. According to a WHO report released last year, household smoke was responsible for 1.6 million deaths worldwide.
Green Energy Africa chief executive Edwin Kinyatti said the uptake of solar energy was likely to continue “since it is affordable to most Kenyans,” even though cultural barriers, low literacy levels and difficult terrain had all presented some obstacles to the Kajiado County effort.
Even as the country’s middle class continues to grow, access to electricity remains low, with 68 percent of the population either too poor or too remote to connect to the national grid.
“Kenya has great potential for the use of solar energy throughout the year, thanks to its location near the equator,” said Lamarck Oyath, an energy expert and managing director at Lartech Africa Limited, a technology and consultancy firm.
“Yet so far, the country gets less than 2 percent of its energy from solar power,” he said.
For villagers like Naiputa, however, solar is proving a big benefit — and not just because of the clean power it provides.
“Our community customs do not allow women to own any property,” she said. “But now women here own the solar technology, and it is something we are very happy about.”
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