June 2008 Archives

Last Saturday we took part in an Open Day at Mzuzu University. It was a great success, both for the organising department TECRET (Testing and Training Centre for Renewable Energy Technologies) and for SolarAid.

We had people from Ungweru Youth Group, Technical College, SJOG (St John's of God), and several sales people also came along to help out- Brave, a sales person from Ungweru came to give technical and commercial advice and information to visitors. Two students from Technical College demonstrated the assembly of paraffin lamp conversion LED units and two members of Ungweru were converting light bulbs. There were solar panel demonstrations and light products were on display in a 'dark box'.

This is a 'dark box', inside which the SolarAid light products were being displayed.

We also held a competition! We invited visitors to come up with ideas for a brand name for our products. The prize was a complete solar package: a solar panel, 3 batteries, a converted light bulb and a parffin lamp conversion LED unit.

The jury deciding the winning brand idea was a trio of specialists, consisting of Maxon (SolarAid trustee and head of TECRET), Harry (Head of the Electricity Department at Technical College), and Brave (Head of Ungweru and our top sales person!).

There were in fact two winners; one for the solar panels and one for the light products. Look at the picture below to see one of our new brand names!

Our new brand name: Kadzuwa Muuni.

It was interesting to see how the SolarAid team could stay in the background during the open day, offering minimum input during the event. This showed us that local people are enthusiastic and very capable of promoting the projects they're involved in.

Visitors at the Open Day at Mzuzu University.

Also, some interesting contacts were made. Dave met some people interested in our project and the products.

I have also designed a new product with the 0.3 watt panel. It's very simple to make with elastic, Velcro and glue. We'll give our sales people sample products to go and demonstrate with out and about. Our market would predominantly be taxi bikes and young people.

That's all for now,

Carl

Some participants at the Open Day, putting together solar panels.

The fourth tale is about volunteers. In Malawi, we have two folks in-country who have pledged to share their skills pretty much for free for two years.

One, an Irish lad called Dave, has business skills, and is leading on helping the locals set up their own small businesses. The other, a Belgian called Carl, has technical skills, and is leading on developing new variants of the solar products as feedback comes in from the sales people in the markets. They are both super-dedicated and wonderful people.

Frankly, I'm not sure if I could do what they are. It's easy to fly in and out for a week. But they are living for two years in a red-mud brick hut with running water sometimes, maybe. And in the week before we were there they had a cobra on the back lawn one day and a green mamba on the front lawn the next. Not even Harrison Ford can deal with that kind of stuff easily.

Jeremy

This is Carl, one of our highly-skilled volunteers out in Malawi.

Here's another tale that involves scaleability, African and otherwise. In Nairobi, on the way home, we met a chap called Fred. Fred was trained two years ago to wire solar chargers. Fred then lived in a Nairobi slum. He took his tiny savings, bought the raw materials for two chargers, wired them up them, designed a professional looking frame and sold them. With the profits he bought four, made them and sold them. And so on.

Now, seventy people work for Fred. He is in Zambia and then Malawi at the moment, doing training for us. As for non-African scaleability, we met all the agencies you need to in Lilongwe, the capital. Everyone, form the Malawian government, through the UN, to the Brits, wanted to help. Our most encouraging meeting was actually at the British High Commission and the UK Department for International Development. A senior official there heard our story, and how we have similar operations on the ground now in Tanzania and Zambia. He thought for a moment and said: why don't you try to replace every kerosene lantern in Africa? Nick and I looked at each other. It's not often we are out-ambitioned by British government officials.

He explained how it could be done, in principle. We would propose a mega-project signed on to by all African governments that would go to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Climate Convention for accreditation. The CDM entails organisations hard-pressed to make carbon cuts in the North paying for cuts made in solar lanterns substituted for kerosene ones in the South (such as the converted lantern in the photo). This would be bound to appeal to African governments, the UK official said, because so far most of the CDM $millions have gone to Asia and Latin America, where it's easier to pull big projects together than it is in Africa. Nick and I went away gratefully and are working on this.

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Following on from my last entry, I'd like to tell two tales of solar from my visit to Malawi. The first tale concerns the power of the "sales proposition" in the thing we have set up. The selling of solar-power for lanterns is close to a no brainer. Our folks on the ground have learned that the key trick is to convert kerosene lanterns.

The reason is that many people have them already, and it's easy to switch. You simply wire up a solar charger, fashion a plastic cylinder with LED lights to drop into the column of the lantern, put the batteries inside the cylinder, and off you go. The fact that nobody in Malawi had been able to buy any kerosene for two months before I arrived kind of helps the case, as does the soaring price even when it is available.

A solar entrepreneur with her solar lantern and panel.

The second tale is related: the number of local organisations and people that can benefit from this. In Mzuzu, our local coordinator Fiskani and our two volunteers lined up a roomful or representatives from small organisations able to make and/or sell solar chargers.

One is a Catholic organisation already teaching handicrafts to people to help them lift themselves out of poverty. Their carpentry workshop currently makes housings for our solar chargers, in which rechargeable batteries can be housed. It's a small step for them to wire up the solar cells too.

Another, called the Centre of Appropriate Techology, has already built a hut with our funding where a production line is up and running. A half dozen or so trained locals turn them out and a first embryonic sales force is out in the markets selling .....easily.

Volunteer Carl and CAT Director Grant, outside the Centre for Appropriate Technology in Mzuzu.

More in my next blog entry.

Jeremy