DAR ES SALAAM—We’ve been in Tanzania for a little over a month now, but I (Tim) want to update you a little on who we are and how we’ve gotten here. We are members of Dartmouth HELP (Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects) Worldwide, a student-led organization at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering that aims to reduce global poverty through socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable engineering solutions. HELP trips are developed in a way that makes sure locally expressed needs are met with community materials and ideas. The group aims to help Dartmouth students put their education to use by partnering with sponsors and NGOs to develop and implement technological solutions in the developing world. We have been working in the Kigoma region of western Tanzania since the spring of 2008 through partnerships with the Dickey Center at Dartmouth, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, The University of Dar es Salaam College of Engineering and Technology (CoET), and the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI). Our goals for Tanzania’s Kigoma region are to improve sanitation and energy technologies in selected villages in order to address severe health and deforestation concerns.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=engineering-help-in-africa-departin-2010-08-03
International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN) and Pakistan Council for Renewable Energy Technologies (PCRET) have collaboratively installed 12 solar energy panel systems in ten different remotely located villages of Ziarat district of Balochistan.With the successful implementation of this solar energy initiative, some of the least developed villages of Balochistan province have been facilitated with provision of solar generated electricity, benefiting around 123 local households.
http://www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=108709&Itemid=2
The government will allocate additional resources to build micro-hydro projects with a capacity of 50-100 KW to provide electricity to every village in the country with the potential to generate electricity but without a power connection. Finance Minister Surendra Pandey said on Sunday that government resources would be made available to generate electricity through micro-hydro projects in such villages within the next three years.
http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=15636166
In the remote interior of Congo, the news was buzzing around the villages: a Canadian company needed workers for a seed farm to produce jatropha plants, a new biofuel for global markets.
The company asked for 20 workers to arrive at 7:30 on a Wednesday morning. “You wouldn’t believe it – there were 800 people who showed up, some of them a few days before, and they slept on the road,” says Louis Tourillon, founder and CEO of Carbon2Green, a Montreal-based company.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/africa/the-seeds-of-change-in-africas-economic-climate/article1579190/
In an effort to raise standards of living across the continent, the World Bank Group’s Lighting Africa Program has chosen five products it believes can bring light to poor and rural communities in Africa.
Lighting Africa is a joint program of the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank. The initiative aims to support the development of modern energy and lighting solutions for people in sub-Saharan Africa living without access to an electricity grid.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/africa/Competition-Aims-to-Bring-Light-to-Africans-Off-the-Grid-94485849.html
Ethiopia, Haiti and Niger are facing the world’s worst water shortages, but 700 million people in 43 countries are under “water stress,” according to a new report released by the World Bank last month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/health/06glob.html
The Solar Electric Light Fund brings solar power technology to people in the developing world. Here we see a project that the group took on in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan using micro-credit and solar as a means to electrify rural communities.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/video/bhutan-on-the-wings-of-light-part-2
Dec 20, 2009 — Xinhua
Another 90,000 people have bidden farewell to a life without electricity in the rural areas of southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region this year, local authorities said Sunday.
The regional government plans to invest 2.5 billion yuan (367.6 million U.S. dollars) to help 510,000 rural people gain access to electricity during the 2008-2011 period, said Gao Yingyun, vice general manager of the Tibet Electric Power Co. Ltd..
To date, local authorities have invested 1.7 billion yuan and provided power to 280,000 farmers and herdsmen, Gao said.
“But there are still 800,000 people in the countryside have difficulties in gaining access to electricity,” he said.
“We will take further measures to expand power grid,” he added.
While accelerating rural energy access will require various strategies, technologies, and players, Innovation in Rural Energy Delivery focuses on opportunities to accelerate access by engaging entrepreneurial small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to provide distributed clean energy technologies, particularly small renewable energy systems and LPG.
http://www.soluzusa.com/innovation.html
Actor/Environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. narrates this wonderful video describing how the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) brought solar power to Sukiki, a small village in the Solomon Islands, on the …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ces000B9tBs&NR=1
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