A Community Management Committee Harnesses Solar Energy in Rural Guinea-Bissau

Story by Matt Boslego, Internal Communications Assistant, Tostan International 

Our year-end fundraising campaign is going strong! As a part of our campaign, we are highlighting different stories from Community Management Committees (CMCs) - democratically selected groups in each community trained in project development and management. CMCs plan and carry out local initiatives and truly lead the way in community development, providing inspiration as we head into the year 2013. Support their efforts by donating today or share this campaign with your friends and families.

 

Fatima Seidi and Awa Mané are trained in solar power maintenance

The village of Mambonco in rural Guinea-Bissau’s cashew-growing heartland is proud to have a primary school within its limits, offering public education to several hundred children from the surrounding area. As is the case in most of the country, children’s study time is drastically limited by the hours of daylight. Guinea-Bissau’s electricity infrastructure, though improving, rarely reaches rural populations.

The Community Management Committee (CMC) of Mambonco, in partnership with India’s Barefoot College, has been able to implement a solution: affordable solar power. Two CMC members, Fatima Seidi and Awa Mané, were trained on solar panel maintenance and installation in India. Today, they work with the village CMC to ensure that the panels stay in good condition and reach as many residents as possible. 

Residents pay the CMC a small monthly fee to rent a panel. The proceeds are kept in a fund which is used to support the solar engineer’s full-time work and to pay for replacement equipment. The additional revenue goes into the CMC’s community support fund, financing community development projects such as planting a community cashew orchard and lending money to small-business ventures in the village. 

Solar Panel Catalog: An Innovative Solution Ensures Electricity in Rural Regions of Guinea-Bissau

Guinea-Bissau has one of the poorest electrical power infrastructures in the world. Even in the capital city, Bissau, where state electricity is available, residents regularly experience 10-hour power outages. Five local women from the remote Oio, Bafata and Gabù regions, however, take the matter into their own hands and light up their communities with solar power.

Solar engineers hard at work

As part of Tostan’s SolarPower! Project, these courageous women attended a six-month training program to become solar engineers at Barefoot College in India. Upon returning home, these newly-trained women were eager to harness their new knowledge and skills but encountered a linguistic complication—they had learned the terms for parts and tools in Hindi and English but not their local languages. Consequently, finding replacement materials at home was a challenge.

Tostan Regional Volunteer Matthew Boslego developed an innovative solution. Matt created a solar panel catalog to provide the solar engineers with “total linguistic access” to everything that they needed. Matt collaborated with local supervisors and Tostan facilitators to build a catalog identifying key items in a variety of local languages. In this interview with Dakar Communications Assistant, Alisa Hamilton, Matt explains his process.

Alisa: How did you get the idea to make a catalog?

Matt: One time I was visiting a village where the panels are installed and I met with one of the solar engineers. One of her screwdrivers had broken. It was a really simple part, a Phillips head screwdriver. The ones they had been buying locally were of a much inferior quality to the ones they had originally been given by Barefoot College. Finding any kind of tools in the rural communities is really difficult because there is close to zero availability for such things. So I had the idea to make a catalog to give them a way to have access to high quality tools, which can be found in the capital but not in the rural regions.

Alisa: What does the catalog look like?

Matt: There are two different copies of the catalog. One of them is written in Portuguese, Creole and Fula. The second one is in Portuguese, Creole and Mandinka in order to give them total linguistic access. The first section explains step-by-step how to use the catalog. If you need a piece, find it in the catalog, call Tostan, send the money for the item to Bissau and a Tostan team member will find the piece for you. They have to pay for it, but Tostan will find it for them. Then someone will bring it out to them during a trip to their communities.

Fatima Seidi finishing solar lanterns in Mambonko

The second part of the catalog has pictures and names of pieces as well as information as to where they can be found. I wanted the engineers to be able to find the pieces themselves just in case, for example, Tostan leaves. I took a picture of every single piece they were given in India  had as well as some other pieces that I thought might be useful—basic things like screwdrivers and wrenches as well as more specific things like soldering irons, additional solar panels, solar batteries, charge regulators, wires. I included anything that they might need that can be found in Bissau.

Next to the picture, I put the name of the piece that they know, which is in English/Hindi, as well as the name in the local language, either in Creole, Portuguese, Fula or Mandinka. I also put the price, location and contact information of the store where the piece can be found.

Alisa: Did anyone help you make the catalog?

Matt: I had a lot of help translating. Tostan supervisors helped me with the Portuguese and Creole, and facilitators, who are the experts in the local languages, helped with the Mandinka and Fula.

The catalog will be distributed to all five solar engineers this spring during in-country trainings. The five women will teach apprentices so that the Solar Power! Project can continue to light up remote regions in Guinea-Bissau for many years to come. 

The Unlikely Solar Engineer

Story by Caitlin Snyder, Tostan Volunteer in Kolda Region, Senegal

Imagine spending all your life in your village of 500. You only ever leave to walk three hours to the nearest village with electricity to recharge your cell phone. On rare occasions, you'll grab a seat in a passing car to visit relatives further away.

Now imagine that you find out you're about to travel to another continent to study solar engineering.

Lamarana Ba didn't need to imagine any of this. The Tostan participant and Community Management Committee (CMC) member of three years left her village one morning to visit with friends and returned later that day to discover that she would be traveling to New Delhi, India as part of an exciting solar energy partnership with Tostan’s Solar Power! Project and the Barefoot College.

Lamarana Ba (left) with friend



The 41-year-old vegetable-seller has lived in Kibaasa, a village in the region of Kolda, southern Senegal, since childhood; Lamarana helped her father in his fields, met her future husband, and raised their seven children all in the small community nestled close to the Gambian border.

Always bustling and ready to share a smile, everyone in Kibaasa knows Lamarana for her neighborhood visits. Her confidence made her the natural choice when the village's 56 Tostan participants came together to elect a community representative for their public health committee. Lamarana's friendly house calls increasingly incorporated discussions about hygiene and family well-being.

When it came to organizing a weekly village cleanup day, Lamarana had no difficulty in getting the community involved; she rings a bell once a week and all the villagers come prepared. Kibaasa's paths and yards are spotless today thanks to this woman’s leadership.



Kibaasa communitiy members



The energy and activism that Lamarana has brought to her position are characteristic of the entire Kibaasa CMC. Recognizing the village's leadership in local development, Tostan invited Kibaasa to take part in an innovative program spearheaded by the Barefoot College. The non-profit promotes sustainable rural development around the world and trains women and men from remote communities to install and maintain solar panels.

For villages like Kibaasa, these panels mean that the community has immediate access to electricity for the first time. Cell phones are more easily recharged, facilitating business and contact with relatives far away. Hours lost walking to a village with electricity can now be invested in caring for family well-being or studying for school.

Kibaasa didn't hesitate when it came time to elect their delegate to the Barefoot College. Everybody agreed that Lamarana was the natural choice to bring business savvy and initiative to the position, which will involve building a sustainable microenterprise around community solar panel usage. Lamarana will apply the small business skills she learned in Tostan classes to develop a pricing system and usage parameters to maximize benefits for her new clients.

In early March 2011, Lamarana and another Tostan participant flew across Africa to join other community activists from around the world at the Barefoot College. When they return home in six months time, the two women will rejoin their families and friends as certified engineers—the first in their villages.

Already a locus of development thanks to the energy of community members, Kibaasa will soon shine even brighter.