India’s Solar Sisters

 

In India recently, I visited a visionary — indeed revolutionary — institution called the Barefoot College, which embraces a very refreshing development ethos. Shunning the paternalistic, hand-out mentality so typical amongst organizations that work with the rural poor, this place seeks instead to empower rural people to uplift themselves by acquiring the technical skills to serve their own development needs.

Set in a small village called Tilonia, in the parched semi-desert of Rajasthan, one of India’s poorest states, the college is a place of informal, unstructured learning, where village women in colorful saris with toddlers in tow sit concentrating on configuring solar-powered electrity circuit boards and soldering radio parts.

It may call itself a college, but this is no ordinary place of learning.

I wanted to go there because I’d heard that the reach of their work extends not only to the parched, isolated villages of India, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan — but also to communities in some 21 different African countries.

I was escorted around the college by Laxman Singh, who has worked at the college for the past 20 years and is himself of low-caste origin. He explained the college’s focus on empowering women by offering them exposure to technologies that aid development and raise living standards in ways that also protect the fragile environments where so many live.

The college itself is a showcase for some of these innovations: solar panels are ubiquitous, as well as parabolic mirror-reflector cookers. Various tanks and channels around the grounds, and conduits on the buildings, form an elaborate system of rainwater collection and storage — inspired by traditional practices.

The women who learn such techniques here, Mr. Singh said, will bring their education and skills back home to their villages and put them to work for the betterment of the community. “Women can change everything,” he says.

That is the idea behind the Barefoot Solar Engineers initiative: women selected by their communities travel to the college in order to learn how to solar-electrify their villages. They spend six months at the college learning the intricacies of configuring circuit boards and hooking up solar panels, before they return home equipped with enough materials and spare parts to be in business for the next 5 to 10 years.

Solar engineers in training

Households pay fees equivalent to what they’d otherwise have to spend on kerosene and candles — thus ensuring sustainability of the program and a livelihood for the barefoot engineer.

Helen Nchenge, 43, from Cameroon was one of 21 women from seven different African countries studying at the college when I visited.

She said that the access to solar lanterns would help children in her village do their school work at night without having to use smelly, dangerous and costly kerosene.

“This is going to change peoples’ lives, because the village has been living in darkness,” she said.

Melting Ice, Rushing Water: Himalayas Part 2

Another thing I missed out on while I was busy wandering incommunicado in the Himalayas was the ruckus over the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s apology for reporting — without scientific basis — that the Himalayan glaciers might likely melt away by 2035. 

How disappointing to learn at this critical moment — when, as I see it, humanity essentially needs to make that leap of faith and accept that climate change is for real, before the window of opportunity to do something about it slams shut — that our venerable and Nobel-lauded climate scientists are prone to hubris and shoddy fact-checking, as if nothing more was at stake than the politics of some podunk biology department. 

While I was blissfully unaware of this latest climate debacle unfolding on Twitter and in the reader forums of the New Scientist, however, I felt a creeping sense of alarm as I climbed higher towards Machupuchre, the distinctively shaped peak at the center of the Anapurna mountain range, and listened to my guide Dambar Thapa speak about the gradual receding of the glaciers that he’s noticed over the years. 

Gazing across a forested valley at the spectacular snow-clad mountains, I was feeling that odd sensation of guilty pleasure that I feel so often when it gets incongruously warm and pleasant in winter. Call it global warming neurosis: a moment of happiness tarnished somewhat by the knowledge that the delicious warmth might well be a portent of suffering and doom. The sun was out, and I had stripped down to my t-shirt. It was probably 20 degrees ( about 70 Farenheit). 

People in the Himalayas speak about global warming not as some distant threat, but as something that’s here and tangible. When my husband and I were planning our trek in Kathmandu, for example, I questioned the tour operator because I had read something about the possibility of avalanches on the route in winter. 

Here today, gone... when?

Water Power in the Himalayas

Harnessing the power of water

Just got back from a spectacular 11 day trek in the Anapurna region of Nepal, to learn of the horror that has gripped Haiti. It’s getting increasingly difficult to cut yourself off from the outside world these days. You pretty much have to go somewhere as remote as the Himalayas.

Even where I was, in the region of the Anapurna Base Camp, globalization is steadily encroaching. For those of us whose lives are ever-complicated by the world’s interconnectedness, a brief escape from the constant flood of news and information is bliss.

But in places where information and resources are so hard to access (everything from a bottle of coke to basic construction materials is carried up the mountain on somebody’s back), one really sees the benefit of spreading good ideas. I’m thinking especially of the access to hydro and solar power which has become widespread in the Anapurna region over the past few years.

Nepal is rich in water resources, and a number of families and trekkers’ tea houses have constructed their own tiny hydro power plants along the banks of the plentiful streams in the area. These are simple sheds fed with stream water which enters in a tube, spins a turbine to generate the power and then is channeled back in the river.

A typical hydropower shed

These are low impact, de-centralized sources of clean energy. Each plant generates something between one and four kilowatts, which means that while cities like Kathmandu cope with six hours of load-shedding a day, these places have a small but steady stream of constant power.

Having access to reliable sources of lighting and heat brings other benefits, too. Now, there’s that much less kerosene to be lugged up steep trails — which is a fire hazard to boot. Plus residents no longer have to gather firewood, depleting the forests. Pretty cool.

VIDEO: Solar power cools camel-transported vaccines on treks to remote areas

VIDEO: Solar power cools camel-transported vaccines on treks to remote areas.

A fascinating idea from Wole Soboyejo, a professor of engineering at Princeton who is doing much to boost the quality of science, higher education and entrepreneurship, both in his home country, Nigeria, and beyond. Check out this video footage from Princeton.

Can the climate change response spur innovation in Africa?

In the final countdown to the UN climate change talks taking place in Copenhagen next month, now seemed like a really good time to take a deep breath and delve back into my past experience covering some of the fearsomely bureaucratic regulatory issues of climate change, like the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol — and the opportunities and perils these present for developing countries — for BNA and the South African Institute for International Affairs.

As Southern Africa appears fated to be hit particularly hard by climate change, two key questions have emerged:

How does the region adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change, which, even if all greenhouse gas-spewing activity were to cease right now, would still continue to accelerate for years to come, due to the delayed cumulative effect of all our prior emissions?

And, how do developing countries spur their growth using clean technologies?

Oh, and of course a third: who will pay?

Food For Thought

How can we as a planet grow enough food to feed our growing population without destroying biodiversity, depleting our water and poisoning our environment with chemicals in the process? One of those zillion-dollar questions…

In South Africa, one of the country’s leading food retailers, Woolworths, last week announced that it has been working with its suppliers to develop a new approach to farming that breaks the cycle of dependence on chemicals, improves the soil, protects biodiversity and conserves water. 

The approach, called “Farming for the Future” is not strictly organic; the idea is to minimize rather than eliminate all those chemical nasties that form the backbone of modern agribusiness — for example by aerating and composting the soil instead of applying synthetic fertilizers.

The company says that by the year 2012 about 85 percent of its fruits and veggies will be produced by the new method — while an additional 6 percent will be organic, and the remaining 9 percent will be imported.

Technology for Tomorrow

People like to say that when you solve one problem, you create others. That’s often true, but if you’re Moses Musaazi, you solve one problem and then apply that solution to solving other problems as well. Musaazi is an engineering professor at Makerere University in Uganda. I visited him at his workshop on the campus earlier this year.

He is also the founder of Technology for Tomorrow and inventor of the Makapad, an inexpensive, locally sourced and environmentally sustainable sanitary pad that has enabled girls in rural areas — without access to the commercial products so many of us take for granted — to stay in school when they get their periods. While girls often face huge obstacles to getting an education to begin with, hidden factors such as absenteeism during menstruation can be a tipping point. 

Made from papyrus and waste paper, the Makapads are cheap and easy to produce. They have made a big difference to girls across Uganda — see this report from Alice Bator, a student at Vanderbilt University who visited him and initiated a giving program — and also spurred a whole new wave of inventions, beginning with a simple fuel-less incinerator made to fit behind school toilets to dispose of the pads.