February 2009 Archives

Scottish and Southern Energy - one of SolarAid's funders- recently sent an employee out to Tanzania to volunteer for a month. Her name is Helen Dalgliesh and she is a Hydro-Engineer.

SSE employee Helen Dalgliesh tests the output of microsolar panels with SolarAid's Head of Programmes John Keane in the office at Dar es Salaam

Read Helen's update and thoughts from Southern Tanzania so far...

"I am now safely in the town of Iringa in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. I travelled up yesterday, on a bus that took about 8 hours. I was lucky. The journey was pretty smooth as the road we followed was the main route from Tanzania to Zambia so metalled all the way.

Typically, the most dangerous thing I have encountered so far has been the roads. Some of the over-taking manoeuvres carried out yesterday were so much worse than anything I have ever seen in the UK.

The views from the bus were fantastic - finally, I have seen zebra, impala, giraffe and monkeys in their natural environment. For one hundred or so kilometres we followed the great Ruaha River (the tailrace of the Mtwere hydro station...) so climbing out of the valley and looking across to the green forested mountains beyond was fabulous.

The photo above shows my first power station construction. Huge at 6W! This is enough to charge a mobile phone and batteries though, and it allows us to do some testing of the realistic output from the cells, plus the charge lifetime of the batteries with the devices that they use here.

Once I arrived at Iringa it wasn't long before I met the people of Neema Crafts which is where I will spend my time. I'm very excited about getting started!"

Hundreds of panels are routinely shipped from all over the world to the Photovoltaic Testing Laboratory at the Arizona State University and once tested, often left. So, Slobodan Petrovic (a Professor in Renewable Energy at the University and soon to be the newest addition to the Tanzania team) suggested that SolarAid should be the beneficiary of these surplus panels.

Thanks to Slobodan, Dr. Mani G. Tamizh-Mani and the rest of the team at the Photovoltaic Testing Laboratory we will soon be receiving several large panels for school and clinic installations.

There should be around 200 macro-solar panels as well about 15 boxes of solar-related books for school libraries plus a large assortment of solar testing equipment and tools - pretty exciting stuff for all the solar geeks out here!

A woman by the mysterious name of 'B' from Ryan World Shipping also gave us a preferential shipping rate to get it all out here.

If that's not enough, recently arrived in the office is a donation from a Canadian company, Carmanah Technologies Corp, who sent us just over 900 micro-solar panels! Thank you to Len and Julie for organising this. We hope to integrate these into our micro-solar and education programmes very soon.

Hello Sunshine! Mason greets the donation of micro-solar panels with a smile

You can all see how happy this has made Mason, Tanzania's Operations Manager. Not to mention the positive impact this donation will make on all the school children, rural communities and entrepreneurs across Tanzania who we'll be reaching.

It's wonderful to see that our work is inspiring partners like these to support us. You too can support our work and help us get more panels onto more schools in rural, poverty-stricken areas.

Thank you,
Courtney

Whilst walking through the Lugoda Village Market in the Mufindi Southern Highlands of Tanzania, I came to realise that a missing component of my research was understanding how much a micro-solar panel costs, compared to other products that a villager would buy in a village market. For example, how much would a panel cost compared to the price of lunch for a hungry villager?

Lugoda Village Market in the Mufindi Southern Highlands, Tanzania

I saw a woman who had just bought a piglet. I asked her how much she paid for the piglet. "40,000 Shillings" she said, as she tried to keep the piglet from running away.

Woman with piglet at Lugoda Village Market

Then I spotted chickens, goats, flip flops, second-hand clothing and cows. And before I knew it, I started to gather different prices for different products that a villager in rural Tanzania would buy and compared the prices to the price of a solar panel (which at 15,000 Tsh is about £7)

Click here to see my findings!...
Product list.doc

Bye for now,
Irna