Bringing electricity to off-grid communities in Rwanda

It takes a little over two hours to drive from Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to Nyagatare in the north-east near the border with Uganda. The roads are good, and there are stunning views of Lake Muhazi on the way. The rolling hills of this region are densely populated and intensively farmed.

For much of the journey the national electricity grid follows the highway, disappearing at times and then reappearing. The small towns we pass through, Rwamagana, Kayonza, Gabiro, are all electrified but there are wide stretches of countryside all around with no sign of power cables.

Around Nyagatare the soil is rich. We turn off the tarmac road onto red earth roads, past houses fronted by colourful flower-borders, fields intercropped with potatoes, beans, maize and cassava. There are dense thickets of banana, bunches of ripening fruit propped up with poles. We cross a river where men are making repairs to the wooden bridge.

‘Every household here has a phone,’ says Francis our translator and guide. ‘They have money but no electricity.’ In a small settlement of a dozen buildings my colleague spots a house with an energy-saving (CFL) bulb hanging above the door. We stop and get out of the car. Children crowd around us, a few adults appear. The owners of the house are in the fields but a neighbour says they have a car battery which they take to the nearest grid-connected town for recharging. The family uses the battery for light and also charges a few phones, for which they levy a fee. This is the only house in the village with a battery we are told.

We drive on a few kilometres to another settlement, larger this time, with perhaps 50 buildings lining a long dirt street. We shelter from a heavy shower in a house which has a light socket outside but no bulb. Inside there is wiring, a light switch, a CFL bulb suspended in the middle of the room, but no electricity. The wiring and light sockets are all they have been able to afford so far. They are saving for a battery which will cost them around $80. They plan to provide a charging service for mobile phones.

No one else in the village has a battery. There are a couple of small stores selling paraffin, candles and torch batteries. People here spend around $2.00 a week on these products for lighting. There are houses selling airtime for Airtel, Tigo and MTN. But charging a phone involves a journey of 7 km on a dirt road. The charge is RWF100, around 17 cents. People typically charge their phones twice a week.

Further along the road we come to a village where we spot a house with a TV aerial, the only one we have seen. The owner has a solar panel on the roof, a battery which he charges from the panel, an inverter for ac current, and various appliances. He has enough power to operate the TV for about two hours a day, leaving enough for lighting and phone charging. He charges his neighbours’ phones for a fee, but these are ‘top ups’. He doesn’t have enough power for a full charge.

Across the street a young man is offering a phone charging service. He also has a solar panel, battery and inverter. He bought the equipment from a previous owner who provided a service here. The panel gives enough power to fully charge seven phones a day and partially charge another three. There are six phones charging behind the counter, another four waiting.

In all the villages we visited people were interested the idea of solar products, and in equipment designed to support small phone-charging businesses. This part of Rwanda is more affluent than the mountainous north and west. Farmers and local businesses here say they would buy products. But affordability and availability are challenges.

Outside a barber’s shop in Nyagatare there are people offering a phone-charging service using power from the grid. Each vendor has a small wooden stand with a lockable cupboard underneath. On top are rows of plug sockets and various types of chargers. The customers’ phones are connected to the relevant charger, then placed securely in the locked area below. We ask if we can buy solar panels in town but the young woman in the booth doesn’t know.

Torches can be bought in a shop just up the street. The store offers a range of products including rechargeable lights which plug into a mains socket. Some include radios and have dry cell batteries as a back-up. They are all Chinese made. A silver-coloured rechargeable torch radio sells for around $7. I buy a light fitting and CFL bulb with a cable and clips for attaching it to a battery. This costs just over $3.

The shop owner tells us he thinks there is someone on the other side of the bus station who stocks solar. We find a man selling batteries and car accessories out of an old shipping container. He doesn’t have solar panels. He used to but says there is no demand. He thinks across town there is a shop which sells them but he’s not sure.

We head in the direction he has indicated, make more enquiries. Finally we track down a woman with a boutique full of leather bags, jewellery, and decorating paint. She is an agent for Barefoot Power. There are no products in stock but she does have a drawer full of brochures. She says she sells five Firefly lanterns and five of the 5W PowaPack systems a month.

Back in Kigali we meet with MTN who have been promoting Fenix International’s Readyset. We also talk to someone from Fenix. Sales have been very slow. Price seems to be the main issue and Fenix are trying to develop a partnership with a micro-finance bank as a result. Another challenge is that customers seem to use the product for home lighting and don’t generate much revenue from charging phones.

GVEP has funding from the Swedish government to support the development of off-grid phone charging service providers in Rwanda. Our programme will kick off in a few months’ time. We are also working with the government on a programme which will provide support to distributors of low cost lighting solutions to help increase availability in towns like Nyagatare.

Who are standards for?

One of the challenges faced by companies selling small solar PV lighting products or advanced cook stoves in Africa is the lack of enforced standards. Competition from poor quality and cheaper products makes the going tough.

Lighting Africa has done a lot of work on product standards and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has standards as one of its major work streams. Defining standards is a starting point – but in themselves standards mean little. Communicating them to consumers is a massive task. Ensuring standards are enforced is equally challenging. For micro and small businesses in the supply chain standards are irrelevant unless consumers understand them and value them.

In the Developing Energy Enterprises Programme, funded by the EU and Dutch governments, which has just come to an end, we worked with a small number of briquette makers in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to help them apply for the national standards mark for their product. This was partly to give them a quality standard to aim for and partly because we believed it would give them an edge over competitors in terms of marketing.

In Tanzania we discovered the standards body actually has no process for assessing applications, but in Kenya and Uganda a few entrepreneurs did apply for and obtained a standards mark. Most entrepreneurs chose not to proceed because the process involves formally registering a business and this has tax implications.

The consistent feedback both from those who obtained the mark and from those who chose not to seek it was that the costs far outweighed the benefits. All of the entrepreneurs were able to sell their products without the need of a mark. Customers assessed quality from their direct experience of the product. They were unaware of there being a national standard and did not know how to evaluate its relevance.

These observations are a salutory reminder that when all the internal workshops and stakeholder consultations are finally concluded, and the standards agreed, the real work is only just beginning. We are many years away from standards really meaning anything in these markets. In the meantime entrepreneurs need to build trust in their product directly with their customers. There is no other way.

This activity was led by one of GVEP’s partners IT Power. A sumary of the results of the work were presented at seminars organised at the end of the programme. The presentation can be found here.

Commercial scale briquette making in Uganda

Early in 2012 GVEP published a study on the potential of the briquette industry in Uganda. Briquettes, if well made, are a viable and affordable alternative to charcoal which is the main fuel used for cooking in and around Kampala. As wood fuel becomes more scarce the price of charcoal is rising. A market exists for briquettes but production in the country is still on a tiny scale.

A number of NGO programmes train individuals in simple manual techniques for making briquettes. These individuals are then able to make small quantities of briquettes for their own use and to sell to neighbours.  The challenge with such approaches is that they cannot achieve the scale of production needed to make briquettes a serious alternative to charcoal for large numbers of people. Factory scale production is needed.

The GVEP report concluded that while briquettes can never wholly replace charcoal, there is sufficient feedstock material for the briquette industry to be much larger than it is. One company which is trying to demonstrate the commercial viability of briquette production at scale is Green Bio Energy. The company was created two years ago by French PhD student Vincent Kienzler and his business partner Alexandre Laure. The company is producing around 1.2 tonnes a day and is about to move into profit.

Vincent started the business as a kind of ‘research project’ linked to his PhD studies. He used his engineering experience to design the production equipment which was then fabricated locally in Kampala. With French and Uganda colleagues he has built a market for their ‘briketi’ branded product amongst restaurants, hotels, and domestic customers. They also sell a premium version of the product through supermarkets. A 1.2kg bag of briketi sells for 900 Uganda shillings (US35 cents.) That is about 80% of the price of the equivalent weight of charcoal.

The company headquarters is in Kampala but the production facility is 30 km away, past the small town of Mukono to the east of the city. You turn off down a dirt track which weaves between small houses and banana trees. The factory occupies a compound of two acres. As you pull in through the gate the first thing which strikes you is the vast drying sheds and two huge tanks which capture water from the roofs of these sheds.  Around the other side a huge corrugated iron barn houses the production machinery. The clatter of engines and equipment drowns out conversation. Half a dozen staff in overalls with ear protectors and goggles are busy with the work.

The company buys waste from charcoal sellers and trucks it to the production centre. Here the small pieces of charcoal are dried, then crushed to a find dust. The dust is mixed with cassava porridge which acts as a binder.

The mixture is fed into a machine where it is compressed into briquettes. The wet briquettes are then laid out wire mesh in the drying sheds and finally are bagged for dispatch to customers. Around 15 people, most of them local, work at the facility.

While I was there the briquetting machine was having mechanical problems. It ran for a while but then stopped and part of the mechanism had to be disassembled for repair. Vincent explained that this was his prototype and some aspects of the design where not quite right. He is fabricating a second machine which will be a big improvement on the first. Having a locally made machine he sees as essential. If you import from abroad and something breaks everything stops if you don’t have a spare part. His colleague Ronan says they know people who imported machines and have faced this problem.

In the GVEP report we talked about the need for companies exactly like this.  Recycling of charcoal waste, supplemented by the carbonisation of suitable biomass residues, could reduce demand for charcoal in Uganda and help the country move towards more sustainable supply of cooking fuel. Green Bio Energy is demonstrating the potential that exists in this market.

Keep your children out of the kitchen

There is an interesting article in the August 2012 issue of Environment and Development Economics (Volume 17, Part 4) about effective ways to reduce children’s exposure to Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) in households which cook with biomass.

The authors, John H. Y. Edwards and Christian Langpap, built an econometric model to evaluate the efficacy of various types of interventions. The model uses information from Guatemala where a rich body of data was available.

You might think that supplying households with efficient stoves and smoke hoods would be the answer, but it wasn’t. Persuading mothers to keep young children away from the kitchen would appear to be a far more cost effective approach.

Of course improved stoves have other  benefits such as reduced fuel consumption. But for a programme concerned about infant morbidity and early development, engineering a chage in childcare practice will probably achieve results. Trying to get women to use more efficient stoves is likely to be much less effective.

Electricity may not improve your health

Supplying electricity to a rural health clinic or hospital in a developing country improves health care and saves lives. We all know that. Or do we?

GVEP recently conducted a review of the literature on electricity access and health for the UK Department for International Development. An extensive search of academic databases and the grey literature identified 1523 documents related to the topic. These were further screened for relevance.  Eighty academic articles and 95 documents from grey sources were then reviewed in detail. At the end of this process just two papers were identified which provided solid empirical evidence. Almost all of the literature reviewed provided only anecdotal claims.

The link between power supply and health outcomes is complex. While electricity may be an enabler of better services on its own it has limited impact. Drugs, medical equipment, trained staff, and a host of other factors also have to be in place. Where a reliable power supply is not available health staff find ways around the problem making it difficult to evaluate the impact of a new electricity supply in health terms. There may be improvements in efficiency and a reduction in cost but changes in local morbidity levels may not change significantly.

There is no disputing that energy supply is part of the package of measures needed to improve health outcomes for people living in poverty. But the literature suggests it is only one element of the solution, and often not the most important. So the next time someone tells you they are saving lives simply by installing solar panels on rural clinics ask them for the evidence.

Energizing Conservation Efforts

Residents of Imbirikani Ranch in Kenya give feedback on improved cookstoves as part of a focus group discussion

The efforts of conservation organizations are crucial in preserving fragile environments and animal species in Africa. Increasingly these environments are coming under pressure from rising populations and human activity and conservation programs must consider both the needs of the animals and the human population. In areas of ecological importance energy services are crucial as communities need to rely less on natural resources such as firewood to lower pressure on depleting forest resources.

Recognising this complex dynamic, the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), under the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (ABCG), contracted GVEP International to produce an in-depth review and documentation of clean energy technologies used by households in the conservation landscapes of Kenya and Tanzania. This review, conducted during 2012, includes details on energy technology suppliers in Kenya and Tanzania as well as insights from other stakeholder activities in household energy and findings from surveys conducted at AWF’s site in Imbirikani, Kenya and JGI’s site in Kigoma Tanzania.

The outputs from this review include a learning report outlining the key findings from the analysis and a toolkit for implementing sustainable energy projects within the context of conservation, both of which are now available here.

I was fortunate enough to be involved in the fieldwork for this assignment and witness the great work that AWF and JGI are doing in Imbirikani and Kigoma respectively. One thing that struck me was the challenging environment many of the communities we visited live in, in terms of infrastructure and accessibility, making it very difficult for households to access energy products and information through existing commercial channels that focus on larger towns and cities.

If energy products such as small solar lanterns can reach such households they can have a large impact on fuel costs and purchasing convenience. For example for residents of Oltiseka village in Imbirikani a distance of around 50km was travelled to the nearest town to purchase kerosene for lighting and mobile phone charging, with households surveyed spending around $2.7 a week on kerosene for lighting. Working through small dealer networks and local savings and credits groups could be one way to increase the reach of these products and Camco has recently embarked on a joint venture partnership with Rex Investments, to develop the solar PV market in Kigoma Tanzania.

Where external distribution networks fail to reach communities, there is potential to produce energy products on a local scale. For example in Kigoma region waste material such as coffee husks are readily available and could be utilized for producing biomass briquettes. Evidence of simple homemade improved stoves was also seen which could be developed further through introducing new designs. Projects such as The Maasai Stove Project in Northern Tanzania have successfully developed stoves with local women and have trained them to install the stoves providing them with additional income.

The assignment provided a great insight into the role of energy technologies in providing for the needs of local communities in conservation areas and the potential for conservation organizations to include energy components in their programs. I hope that the tools provided from the review will assist these organizations to meet some of these goals moving forward and further strengthen links between the energy and conservation communities.

A mobile phone charging revolution?

I recently visited a group of micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya who are testing an innovative phone charging system. The product was developed by the award winning company Azuri and operates on a ‘pay as you go’ model. The entrepreneur pays a deposit to acquire the unit and monthly top ups to operate the system.GVEP recruited the participating micro-businesses and is managing the trial. For more details read my guest blog on the GSMA website. http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/a-look-at-azuris-mobi-solar-mobile-phone-charging-unit-in-kenya/