The project has potential to accomplish several things:
- Provide ICT * services to rural and peri-urban areas where the lack of electricity and/or infrastructure prevents people from accessing them using clean energy technologies.
- Train and provide tools to entrepreneurs so they can run successful renewable energy businesses.
- Provide value-added services on areas of renewable energy and benefit the community at large through more access to ICT services. This could translate into improvements in education and governance, and increased access to information relevant to agriculture or health.
A typical RBC that I had the chance to visit last week
When I say potential, I really mean potential. The reality is that there are many challenges; from solar panels not working to entrepreneurs not keeping good records or not making enough profit to pay back their loans.
The project is about to scale up so my role this summer is to help KITE understand the challenges faced by the RBCs by conducting surveys and spending time with the entrepreneurs! Some questions I'll be looking at are: Why are some RBC’s successful and others are not? Can and are they producing the social returns they are meant to? What kind of support can KITE provide to the entrepreneurs? What are the opportunities for creating awareness about renewable energy and benefiting the communities?
My placement is turning out to be a little different from other JF placements in that KITE has very specific expectations and tasks for me and there are five other volunteers working with KITE this summer. Shyam, another EWB JF, and two interns from Queen’s Project in International Development, QPID are working with me on e-CARE. Although we will be working on the planning and analysis together, we will make most visits to the RBC’s individually. Right now we are working on familiarizing ourselves with how a successful RBC could look like and what we could be looking for to assess how well it is doing. Soon we will be visiting centers and putting together a report with recommendations for the scale up. During these visits I will be able to spend some time in the communities where the RBC’s are located and see a little of the South of Ghana!
Mary and I outside of the KITE office
I am hoping that by working on e-CARE I’ll be able to understand how the access to ICT’s helps Dorothy**, how using a business approach to provide social services can contribute to development and how that looks in practice for an entrepreneur. Yep, big goals for a short placement! But that is why I have YOU to help me ask all the questions ;) KITE has other cool projects related to energy and enterprise development so I’ll be looking out to learn more about them too. Please keep your questions coming!
*Information and Communication Technologies
**Dorothy is EWB’s term for the people we work for and hope to have a positive impact on
2 comments:
Hey Andrea,
Hope all is well with you and you're enjoying your time overthere. Just finished reading your two newest blogs and I have a question about these ICTs you speak of. How complex are these ICTs in regards to the technologies they use (IE: Satillite, Cellular or LAN communications)and how are they maintained? Solar power is difficult to work with even in North America due to a lack of popular acceptance and knowledge. Is solar power much more widespread in Ghana than in Canada (and is it cheaper)? Given the cost is it the best solution (as opposed to a small diesel generator)?
Cheers,
Shane
Hey Shane!
Sorry for the super late reply.
The ICT component is pretty simple as far as I know. The phone is GPRS (I think) and the service is the same that GT provides in other parts of the country so it's an expansion of their current network.
Solar power is not that common in Ghana and so far one of the biggest challenges with it has been to secure a solar energy provider that can provide maintenance to the equipment often. Although the entrepreneurs receive a short introduction to the use of the solar panels and inverters, there have been some incidents when the equipment has failed due to improper use. The relatively large cost of the solar component to the entrepreneurs is one of the aspects I'm looking into especially because they don't seem to be benefiting from it to the extent that they could. Some centers are only using it as a backup to electricity although they do have an advantage over other business when the lights are off.
Now that you mention appropiate technologies let me tell you about something really cool that I saw while I was visiting the village. Since most of the households don't have electricity yet, it is very common to see rechargable flashlights or torches that are relatively cheap (about 3 Ghana cedis or dollars). In locations like this the centers could be really useful because they could recharge the torches for a small fee and the households would save on batteries or oil!
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