Not so long ago, whenever he wanted to watch a soccer match or recharge his mobile phone, Ousmane Kantcho had to go “into town” — a 15km ride by bicycle on bad roads in the savannah.
His village, Tababou, lies more than 600km from the Togolese capital, Lome.
There, in one of Africa’s most energy-starved places, homes would plunge into darkness at nightfall, for the village was not connected to the national electricity grid. Torches provided the only light.
Photo: AFP
“After 6pm prayers, everyone stayed at home — there was nothing to do,” said Kantcho, a 35-year-old farmer.
“Everything’s different now,” he said, turning on his TV set.
Tababou has gone solar.
“Everyone gets together to watch the match at home and the children can do their homework late in the evening,” Kantcho said.
The creature comforts that are standard around the world — lights, TV and electrical sockets — have become available thanks to a 50-watt solar panel, installed on the roof of Kantcho’s mud-walled hut.
Kantcho and thousands of others are the beneficiaries of a public-private initiative launched in 2018 that aims to provide electricity across the West African country by 2030.
That objective, budgeted at 952 billion CFA francs (US$1.58 billion), would be met in great part by bringing in clean, renewable energy in rural areas, where most of Togo’s 8 million people live.
Locally generated power is far cheaper than connecting remote villages to a central grid — and helps to wean Togo off energy imported from Ghana and Nigeria, which provide half of its electricity needs.
“Not so long ago, we were really far behind other countries in the region, but we’ve gone full-bore over the last two years,” Abbas Abdoulaye, head of Togo’s agency for rural electrification and renewable energy, AT2ER, told reporters.
Only 30 percent of all Togolese had access to electricity in 2016 and 2017, a figure that has risen to nearly 50 percent today, he said.
Half of Togo’s population lives on less than US$1.90 per day, the threshold of extreme poverty, the World Bank has said.
People in more than 2,200 villages so far have taken the plunge by buying a solar home system, a kit comprising a solar panel, a charge controller to regulate power and a battery to store the energy for when the sun is not shining.
The kit is enough to power lights, a radio and a small TV for several hours a day.
The systems are being sold and installed by private companies, such as Britain’s Bboxx, which said it has sold more than 150,000 systems in more than 35 countries.
Customers pay an installation charge of about 10,000 CFA francs and then pay off the cost of the gadget in monthly installments of 4,800 CFA francs over the next three years. Half of the cost is subsidized by the state.
“It operates a bit like microcredit,” Bboxx marketing director for Togo Alexandre Kouigan said.
More than 500,000 households would get individual kits over the next decade, the government hopes.
According to a report by the UN Environment Programme and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Africa offers one of the world’s most promising markets for solar — investment rose 19 percent in 2018 from 2017, to US$10.1 billion.
Some villages in Togo are opting for a more sophisticated system — so-called solar mini-grids, comprising a centralized group of panels to harvest the sunlight, and whose power is shared among households and shops and nearby cellphone towers.
The village of Takpapieni, in the far northern region of Savanes, gained one of Togo’s first mini-grids in May 2018.
Two of the participants in the scheme are Daniele Daoula and her husband. She grows crops to pay for the power credits.
“We like it, but it gobbles up money,” she said.
“When you buy 2,500 CFA francs of credits, that’s not enough for even a month,” she said, laughing. “When the credit runs out, we just sit in the dark!”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS