ElectricAid:
Solar Lighting for Kaphuka, Malawi
ElectricAid
ElectricAid donated €10,000 towards the Cara Malawi Kaphuka Solar Panel Project in June 2009. The project involved the delivery and installation of 100 solar units to the village of Kaphuka, Malawi, as well as the training of two local women at Barefoot College India for six months. These women are now qualified Solar Engineers and the skills they have learned will be passed on to the other people in the village.
Chloe Kinsella, of ESBI Carbon Solutions, recently travelled to Malawi to visit Kaphuka as part of her part-time research Masters entitled ‘Off-Grid Energy Solutions for Developing Countries’. Chloe is carrying out this project in collaboration with Dr Tony Robinson and Wayne O’Connell from Trinity College Dublin. The three visited Malawi accompanied by Christina Lynam, Chief Executive, Cara Malawi, to see the impact of the solar panels on the village and to help inform them in their design for other lighting systems in neighbouring villages.
There are approximately 15,000 people living in Khapuka in very primitive conditions. Many of the houses have no windows, so the population were living with darkness day and night. The solar panels have made an enormous difference to people’s lives. Not only do they provide power for light, they can be used to charge mobile phones and power radios. One chief told the team that his village now has music.
The importance of light is hugely underestimated in the Developed World. In Kaphuka, the local people went to bed at dusk because they had Updateno source of light. Children had to wake at dawn during exams, because they could not study at night. The installation of solar panels has changed all this.
“The work being carried out by Christina Lynam, Chief Executive, Cara Malawi, is extremely admirable”, says Chloe Kinsella. “The respect and appreciation that the people of Kaphuka have for Christina is truly heart warming. ElectricAid’s contribution has made an immense improvement in these people’s lives.”
The Trinity team are looking at generating light from cooking stoves in three villages in the district of Dzandi, Malawi. The local people’s current method of cooking is on three stones over an open fire. The smoke in the huts is suffocating and the fires are very inefficient. The research team hope to install efficient stoves that reduce the indoor smoke and fuel consumption. They also want to generate sufficient electricity from the stoves to power a battery, which in turn will power lights, radios and charge mobile phones. The method they are considering using is thermoelectrics. A thermoelectric generator converts a temperature difference into a voltage, very similar to a thermocouple, except thermoelectric generators are more efficient.
Chloe and her Trinity colleagues plan to go back to Malawi in the summer and deploy a series of pilot cooking-stove generators in the district of Dzandi.
