A Haitian company returns its expertise to Africa

The Inter Press Service has a great story today about a green energy company that is based in Haiti. ENERSA makes solar powered street lamps using small solar panels to power each light. The company employs people that live in the biggest slum of Port-au-Prince.

IPS writer Peter Costantini tagged along with a couple of ENERSA's founders as they traveled to Senegal to cooperate with another green energy company. Click on the link to the full story to read more about how the Haitian entrepreneurs learned about their ancestry in Africa during the trip.

A Senegalese firm specialising in solar-power installations, KAYER, had invited Noël and technician Frantz Derosier to visit the westernmost nation of West Africa to teach their employees how to fabricate their own photovoltaic (PV) panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.

Noël is co-founder, along with his partner Alex Georges, of ENERSA - Énergies Renouvelables, S.A. (Renewable Energies, Inc.). Derosier is one of their 20-odd employees. ENERSA manufactures solar streetlamps and other solar-energy equipment using PV panels that they build from scratch. They count around a thousand such lights installed in over 50 municipalities all over Haiti.

After the catastrophic earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010, which knocked out electrical power across the Port-au-Prince area, these lamps were the only public light sources for some localities. The temblor also destroyed much of ENERSA's physical plant, but all the employees survived and the firm was able to restart production within a few months.

During the nine days Noël and Derosier were in Senegal, a former French colony like Haiti, they conducted a week of training sessions with KAYER in the headquarters of a peasant farmers' confederation in the town of Mekhe, about 100 kilometres inland from Dakar, the capital.

The sessions resulted in the first solar panels "made in Senegal". The ongoing collaboration, according to ENERSA, will cover the conception and manufacturing in Senegal of solar products, including solar streetlights.
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Derosier and nearly all the other ENERSA employees are young men from Cité Soleil, the biggest bidonville (shantytown) in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, where jobs are prized rarities. ENERSA trained them for several weeks in electronics and metal fabrication skills, and pays them wages well above the going rate in Haiti, where the majority tries to survive on a dollar or two a day.

Funding clean energy businesses for developing countries

One of the most important needs to address when developing the world is energy. Providing energy to the under-developed world presents an extra challenge because we cannot rely on the fossil fuel technology that is used in the west. The energy needs to be clean and it needs to be very cheap so people on the bottom of the economic pyramid can afford it.

One company received a write-up today that is helping to fund clean energy solutions to the under-developed world. The company called E+Co, loans money to businesses who develop solar lamps and other kinds of green energy.

From Time Magazine, writer Bryan Walsh gives us this profile of E+Co.

In the 1990s, E+Co grew out of the Rockefeller Foundation, the venerable philanthropic organization that has funded development assistance for decades. Its philosophy is still the same: find entrepreneurs on the ground in the developing world who are ready to market clean-energy solutions, and get them the capital and support they need to get started. E+Co — which has offices in Africa, Asia and South America — works with local NGOs to support those entrepreneurs, often bypassing governments on the ground. Most of the projects they help fund are off-the-grid energy solutions — solar panels or biogas, which is produced with animal or human waste. That has another added benefit: for those parts of the developing world that aren't wired to any kind of power grid, on-site generation can be an instant solution. Solar panels remain a green luxury for citizens in rich nations — they already have access to reliably cheap power — but for those who are truly off the grid, solar might offer the only way to get electricity quickly, without waiting for a government to string power lines to a rural village.

The energy problem isn't just about electricity. E+Co has begun to move into clean cook stoves, one of the most underpublicized but important health-and-development challenges in the world. Too many of the global poor still use basic wood stoves for heat and cooking, and the resulting indoor air pollution in badly ventilated homes kills more people every year than malaria. Wood stoves also mean that someone in a developing world family — almost always a woman or girl — needs to spend long hours gathering firewood, sacrificing time that could be spent in a school or business. The clean cook stoves E+Co is supporting — which often run on biogas — can help change that. "This is a very real health threat that can be fought with the right investment," says Singer. "This really is a win-win."

There's ample funding available for clean energy projects around the world — after all, Europe and Japan are still operating under the Kyoto Protocol and need to purchase carbon credits to meet their emissions reduction targets. Billions of dollars worth of investment run through the U.N.'s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which verifies the soundness of projects and issues carbon credits. But most of that money flows to major industrial projects in high-emission countries like China, which gets more than 60% of what's available, while Africa and South America (aside from Brazil) are barely on the map. That's because there's little incentive for funders to seek out small community projects; investors get more carbon credit for their buck helping one major Chinese factory become more efficient than finding dozens of small-scale solar projects of the sort E+Co funds. "We have to queue up and they always take someone bigger," says Singer. "We're never at the top of the list on CDM."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2045426,00.html#ixzz1Ci82wJCs

Solar lamps as an empowering tool

Evans Wadongo ruined his eyes due to kerosene smoke. The kerosene was needed in his Kenyan boyhood home to provide light and heat. Evans would huddle next to the lamp to complete his school homework. The damage to his eyes didn't stand in the way of Evans finding a solution to avoid the same plight for others. Evans has started a non-profit that gives the solar lamps to Kenyan villagers.

From this AFP story that we found at Yahoo, we find out how Evans Wadongo provides more than light for Kenyan villagers. Evans was also profiled at CNN Heroes.

Some 15,000 lamps have been turned out since production started in 2004, and Wadongo says his goal is to hit 100,000 by 2015.

"I started in the village where I grew up and I saw kids going from primary into high school," he told AFP.

He has no time for Kenya's political class, accusing them of "wanting people to remain poor so that they can stay in power".

For Wadongo, the lamps are not an end in themselves, but rather "a way to lift people out of poverty."

He and his team from the "Use Solar, Save Lives" project start by identifying impoverished communities that rely for lighting on kerosene lamps -- when they can afford the fuel. They hand out 30 lamps to a community association, often a women's group, and encourage the locality to pool the money each family has saved by no longer buying kerosene.

When the fund accumulates the group can use it for a project, such as fish farming or rabbit breeding.

Nomadic communities get a special model of lamp for easier transport.