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African countries are increasingly concerned with meeting the pressing demands for a minimum level of energy services for their poor, while ensuring protection of their environment. Many of the poor have no electricity and continue to rely on inefficient and environmentally risky unprocessed biomass fuels. Furthermore, the decentralised nature of human settlements in Africa means that distribution costs for conventional centralised power systems are high. Extending power from centralised generating stations to individual homes is costly. In this context, renewables such as solar energy are particularly effective for delivering energy to Africa’s rural poor in an appropriate manner. The proposed SolarAid programme will train solar entrepreneurs in rural areas in Zambia to set up their solar microbusinesses and generate an income by building and selling small solar lanterns, radios and mobile phone chargers.
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This innovative project will train impoverished people in Zambia so that they can build solar-powered radios, solar mobile phones or solar lamps. We teach business planning and marketing to help beneficiaries set up microbusinesses to sell these solar products to the rural population. They reinvest part of the profit into their microbusiness – which becomes self-sustaining – and use the rest to pay for food, clothes, education and other essentials for themselves and their families. SolarAid will provide initial materials to help groups start up their micro businesses. It will then provide ongoing support and logistics until groups are able to function sustainably as businesses. The sale of these solar products will have a major impact on the customers. Rural households spend 30% of their income on kerosene for lamps, batteries for radios and on charging their mobile phones. A solar charger would lead to major savings, which beneficiaries would spend primarily on school education. A solar lantern leads to a reduction of approximately one tonne of carbon over five to eight years. About SolarAid: We believe that the two most important threats facing humanity today are climate change and global poverty. SolarAid was launched in 2006 as a response to this. SolarAid aims to enable the world’s poorest people in Africa, Latin America and Asia to have clean, renewable power. Solar power leads to better education, health, safety and income by allowing poor communities to cook, pump water, run fridges, store vaccines, light homes, schools, clinics and businesses, power computers and homes, farm more effectively, and much more. By replacing carbon emitting technologies, solar power has a mitigating effect on global warming.