I’ve been interning at Lifeline Energy for three months and so far it’s been an incredible learning experience. I’ve learned more about how development occurs on the ground in two months than I did in a year of graduate school. When I first started, I knew that much of sub-Saharan Africa was off the grid, but I hadn’t conceptualized what this meant for daily lives. For example, I didn’t realize that millions are still lighting their homes and fueling their stoves with kerosene. Kristine’s blog really highlighted the dangers of kerosene for me as well. Some of the statistics about energy poverty are staggering. The fact that some people are forced to spend 40 to 60 percent of their income on kerosene makes it impossible to break the cycle of poverty. The gender dimensions of energy poverty are also sobering, as is women’s lack of access to information in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, both of which Lifeline Energy addresses.
I was struck by how much the lives of young women were changed simply by having access to solar lights. Access to radio also has a transformative effect on the lives of women and girls. In one report I read, it was revealed that after forming listening groups, Somali women in Kenya’s Dadaab camps began talking about important issues like FGM and gender-based violence, which is the first step to stopping both practices. In fact, some women reported that they had decided not to submit their daughters to FGM because of information they received through the radio broadcasts. It hadn’t occurred to me that something as simple as a radio or a light could change people’s lives so much. It definitely hadn’t occurred to me that my own life would be transformed in the course of three months, but it has.
The team here at Lifeline Energy is amazing. I’ve learned a great deal from each one of them and I would like to thank them for making my time here at Lifeline Energy enjoyable.
Cholera outbreaks were a recurring problem in Dondo, Central Mozambique, resulting in 200 painful deaths each year. Once the community radio station started broadcasting health programmes in Sena and Ndau, the local languages, people understood how they got ill and changed their behaviour. The next year no one in Dondo died from cholera.
In the age of the Internet and cell phone, community radio remains a powerful way for people to connect, learn and discuss issues important to their lives. Like the name would indicate, a community radio station is built and run by a community. It usually has a relatively small footprint (up to 60 miles) and broadcasts in the local language. Community radio station licences are based on not accepting funds from political parties or supporting one political party or candidate over another, and are owned, managed and run by community members. Although they may receive donor funding to start, they have to be sustained by the community in the long term.
Communication strengthens grassroots development
A community radio station is an essential development tool. It provides a vehicle for true empowerment and grassroots development. When the community station is owned and run by local women and men overall community involvement is strong. Gaining access to accurate information and having an opportunity to voice opinions through call-in shows or by working with programme production at the station, the community can use the radio station to address problems and find lasting solutions. When the radio station is ‘ours’, listeners trust the programming. There is confidence in what is aired, advice is more likely to be followed, and positive, social change can take root.
Community radio has been used to stimulate social change the world over since the 1940s in Latin America and the US, and in Europe since the early 1970s. Since the early 90s it has increasingly been recognised as a powerful tool for empowerment in communities tackling social, political and economic development challenges, not least in Africa. Hundreds of community stations in South Africa, Mali, Mozambique and Niger, for example, all broadcast locally relevant content – news, health, agriculture & environment, education, rights, announcements, and so forth.
Rosa from Radio GESOM in Chimoio, Mozambique
In addition, community radio is effectively used for celebration, preservation and further development of local culture. For example, many community stations in South Africa broadcast ‘stories of the ancestors’, which is an important cultural component of life. When the radio station airs in the local language, new pride blossoms as I saw in Tanzania with a Maasai community who said to me, “through our own radio station, we got our identity back!”. In Ghana, traditional chiefs have adopted community radio to interact with their people.
Empowering women by giving them a voice
Issaka Maïmouna Habibou, Director of ’Radio Communitaire Terá’ in Niger
It has taken a while to get women behind the microphones in many communities: women traditionally work in the home, in the field, as well as walk to collect firewood and water. Taking the lead in public is quite foreign to the role of women in a rural African context. But this notion has changed in many communities, realising that, actually, women are at the core of the family and the community. It is women who tell the stories about the past and pass on the traditions to the young ones. Women also want to learn about women’s issues from a woman’s voice.
Women station managers are still not commonplace. But where they are, the stations are often more sustainable. In Terá, Niger, 140 kms outside the capital Niamey, it was Issaka Maïmouna Habibou, who received me in the Director’s office. And all the people working at the station were women. She explained that the station’s money had disappeared along with CDs and equipment. When the radio board had finalised their investigation, letting those with long fingers go, only women were left.
In most African countries, literacy is still a challenge. Large populations are not sufficiently literate to read a newspaper or to use the Internet actively. This is where radio still comes into its own as a communication tool and will continue to do so for a long time to come.
Birgitte Jallov is the founder of EMPOWERHOUSE, an organisation that assists communities, non-profits, governments and funders with finding integrated solutions to create and strengthen community radio. Her book ‘Empowerment Radio – Voices creating a community’ will be published soon. To learn more about community radio contact Birgitte on birgitte.jallov@mail.dk. Follow EMPOWERHOUSE on twitter.
Our Lifeplayer is a finalist in the INDEX: Design to Improve Life Awards. We’re honoured to be a finalist (in one of five categories) out of nearly 1000 global entries. INDEX: is the world’s top award for designs that address humanity’s biggest challenges. For Lifeline Energy that challenge is delivering information and educational content to large groups of marginalized, isolated or displaced communities on demand. The Lifeplayer makes that possible.
INDEX:’s recognition helps highlight how trusted voices can effectively address pressing issues like literacy, health, hygiene, violence, rights, trafficking, environment and business skills training for the poorest. The Lifeplayer is powered by solar and a wind-up crank, enabling it to deliver learning 24/7 to anyone, anywhere – democratizing knowledge.
With advances in digital and media player (MP3) technologies, I knew designing a product that could be pre-loaded with huge amounts of content to be played over and over would be possible and practical. If we got it right, it could be a game changer and impact millions. We tend to overlook that in the time of nano-technology, Internet, iPads, and Android phones, sometimes the power of the imagination sparked by a human voice is the most powerful.
For Lifeline Energy, the history of our product designs starts with stories of everyday life in rural Africa. This is true with the Lifeplayer, a product that almost never came about.
When we began operating more than 12 years ago, we were working with original model wind-up radios. Although they provided radio access to isolated communities, they would break if wound anti-clockwise. This was devastating to Rwandese orphans living on their own. As survivors of the genocide, having a voice on the radio they could trust meant so much. These children told me that they would listen to the radio from the time they woke up until they went to sleep. They were starved for information on current events: they wanted to know the weather and time; and practical information on the diseases from which they suffered, rape and violence against girls, farming, and life in general – all things that a family member would customarily provide.
Seeing the heartbreak that broken radios caused gave me the idea for a radio specifically designed for youngsters living on their own and for distance education. This flew against conventional wisdom, but it was something I deeply believed was needed and for which there was a market. These destitute and traumatized children were my compass; they told me what they wanted and needed and I set about making it happen.
Since its debut in 2003, the power-independent Lifeline radio has offered free learning access to tens of thousands of child-headed families and millions of children enrolled in radio distance education schools.
That said, as with every technology, there are limitations. A school may be located where a signal doesn’t reach. I recall in Pemba, an island off the coast of Tanzania, pupils weren’t able to listen to their school lessons for two weeks because the ship delivering diesel fuel to the community radio station didn’t arrive. Or there was Mary, a Kenyan schoolgirl who missed four days of radio lessons because of her period. In South Africa, children in Kwa-Zulu Natal who lived on the wrong side of the stream, which became a torrent during the rainy season, lost weeks of schooling. If you miss a broadcast, it’s lost forever.
To begin creating the Lifeplayer, we wrote proposals and generated a design brief based on what teachers, content providers and community leaders told us they wanted. We sent proposals far and wide. A European government even agreed to fund it. However, that fell through. Raising design and development funding isn’t easy at the best of times. In 2008, it was especially hard. I felt very discouraged.
Then our US patron, Tom Hanks, changed everything. Not only did he fund our proposal, he enlisted his friends to support us. Tom understands our technology and its positive impact on the poorest members of society. Having Tom’s financial backing was crucial, while his encouragement and kindness have been priceless.
I would be disingenuous if I were to say that it’s been easy bringing a design to market in this economic climate. It’s not only been the toughest challenge of my own career, but also of its designer, Phil Goodwin. Phil has had to work within a razor-thin budget to deliver a product that meets the expectations of end-users in some of the world’s toughest environments. He’s done it and he’s also been able to create an upgraded radio-only version of the Lifeplayer, called the Prime (which supersedes the old Lifeline radio). Ultimately, he was able to design two products for the price of one, so to speak.
We believe that the Lifeplayer will enable poor children across the developing world achieve a more level playing field. Learners in the most remote schools who may gather under a tree still have to take the same exams as city kids with computers and electricity at home. Standardized school lessons loaded onto the Lifeplayer allows learning to take place when and where needed.
Another feature that teachers have told us they are excited about is that the Lifeplayer can record. They can record their own lessons in advance when they know they will be away from their classroom.
For communities that have lost everything, the Lifeplayer can disseminate important radio announcements to disaster or conflict-displaced populations, which also can be recorded for replay later. In addition, Lifeplayers can provide immediate psycho-social support and entertainment.
I feel profoundly proud as a small values driven organisation, attempting to correct the injustice of energy and information policy, to be recognised by INDIX:. This type of recognition of our work inspires us to strive even harder to fulfill our mission.
We salute the other finalists who also have been honoured. I’m looking forward to seeing their designs and meeting the innovators behind them in early September in Copenhagen.
Project manager Chhavi Sharma distributes lights to students in Nairobi slum
Little Bees School is run by Mama Lucy Odipo in Starehe, a densely populated section of Nairobi’s Mathare Valley slum. Lifeline Energy has been working there for more than three years. Kristine Pearson, Lifeline Energy’s CEO, and I were there to distribute solar-powered and wind-up Lifelights.
When questioned about their study habits, they told us that they usually read by the poor flame of a candle or koroboi, the traditional kerosene lamp made from tin cans. Even then, their use is economised and carefully budgeted, so that the kerosene can be made to last as many days as possible. All members of the household have to share it, as there is no electricity in the area.
The children use the substitutes for electricity, i.e. the candle or koroboi, to study and do their homework in the evenings, but cannot do so for more than 20-30 minutes at a stretch, as the smoke greatly irritates their eyes and often makes them spit up black soot, they went on to explain.
The hazardous and undesirable effects of candles and kerosene on indoor air quality, which result in health – especially respiratory – issues and accidents, such as burns and fires, is well documented. These children, some as young as 12 years old, confront these problems on a daily basis, since they also use the candles and korobois to go to the communal toilets and assist their mothers with household chores, like preparing the dinner, washing the utensils and making the beds, after dark.
The children told us that the lights will enable them to study for one or two hours every night, giving them enough time to complete their homework. They believe ti will improve their academic performance in school over time. This was extremely important to them, as some of them are gearing up for national exams at the end of this year, which will gain them entry into secondary schools. In addition, the lights will help them feel safer by making it easy for them to spot thieves lurking in the alleyways and snakes and scorpions, when they walk to the toilets in the dark. Household size averages five in Starehe and all will now benefit.
The distribution of the lights was empowering for so many children and their families, and extremely moving for both Kristine and myself, as it gave them access to a practical tool that will help change their lives and brighten their future in more ways than one with immediate effect.
Women and men who devote their lives to making a difference for others are publicly honored as ‘heroes’ by CNN, Time magazine, Skoll Foundation and others. I believe that the real heroes are those unsung, unrecognized people living in the communities they serve and who are often live in poverty themselves.
One such hero was 31-year old Victor Ochieng. Victor had worked his way up from security guard to headmaster of Little Bees, a school built beside a refuse dump in Nairobi’s sprawling Mathare Valley slum.
In 2008 I was introduced to the much loved, irrepressible, larger than life, 60-year old Mama Lucy Odipo, a community organizer and founder of the Little Bees School. The school is situated in Starehe, a seven-hectare maze of rusty iron roofed shacks and shops, muddy alleyways and rocky streets. Mama Lucy received one of our radios through a women’s group and she invited me to visit the school.
A colleague and I arrived to the parking area next to the sign (land) ‘grabbers will face necessary action’. We walked down a slope criss-crossing the muddy, smelly stream of sudsy wash water mixed with raw sewage, which flowed into a narrow tributary of the brown Nairobi River that was choked with garbage. We turned right into an unmarked dark passage just wide enough for two people and heard the sound of children laughing. It was recess.
“Welcome to Little Bees, my name is Victor.” A tall, thin man wearing khaki trousers and tennis shoes extended his hand to me with a smile. He told me that he was the head of security and proudly showed me around. Victor escorted me to the small playground, packed with children playing on equipment that included a rickety jungle gym, an upside down wheelbarrow and a seesaw.
On one side of the playground were sheet metal, dirt floored, sand flea infested, makeshift classrooms filled with second-hand desks. Each classroom only had one small window. On the other side were two unpainted brick classrooms. I could see that they were building a second floor with plastic tarp walls. The children shimmied up and down a rough-hewn ladder as if it were stairs with a railing. It made me nervous, but no one else seemed to be. The toilets were overflowed, as evidently the municipality had not emptied them. Little Bees would be condemned in America or Europe.
Nonetheless, the 20 orphans taken in by Mama Lucy, some of whom are disabled, and the more than 180 day students, were as playful and full of life as any child in an upmarket school. They crowded around me and welcomed me with a song. Their red and blue uniforms with white shirts were patched and mended hand-me-downs, most of which did not fit. Every day the children ate a hot meal prepared by volunteer mothers from the neighborhood cooked in a big iron cauldron over a wood fire. Although hugely under-resourced, the children were loved, fed and thriving. Victor adored the children and they clearly loved him.
Primary education is free in Kenya. There is an acute shortage of schools in slums. Non-formal schools like Little Bees spring up to provide an education offered by volunteer teachers, who may not have a teaching qualification. Victor told me how much they appreciated listening to the school lessons broadcast by the Kenya Institute of Education on our radio, especially for subjects like science and maths.
A few months later, I returned to Little Bees and Victor greeted me like a long lost friend, telling me that he’s ‘moved up’ to librarian and head of procurement. I had a Tom Hanks Day t-shirt with me given to Lifeline Energy by Kevin Turk, an American who raises funds for us each year through his International Tom Hanks Day fundraising event. It was too big for the children, so I gave it to Victor.
As I was taking some video, Victor reappeared in his new t-shirt and I casually asked him if he knew whom Tom Hanks was? He thought for a minute and said the he did not. I asked him to guess. Here’s the sweet video.
Over the next few visits, ‘Tommy Honks’ as Victor called him became an inside joke between us and we always laughed about it.
Last year in May, before the World Cup, I gave Victor a Vuvuzela in the colors of the South African flag. It was the first one that anyone had seen (other than in a newspaper) and Victor swiftly became the Pied Piper of Starehe. As he blew it and the children followed him around the school and into the street. He was so proud of his new ‘trumpet’ and he loved entertaining the community.
Every time I’ve been in Nairobi, probably nine times in the past three years, I have visited Little Bees. Each time Victor had been promoted – from security, to procurement, to librarian to social studies teacher, to deputy headmaster. Victor’s life was the school. With each visit Victor proudly showed off his latest renovation. On my last visit he was being groomed to take over as headmaster, enabling Mama Lucy to slow down.
I emailed Mama Lucy in January to tell her I was coming to visit. She wrote me back and told me that Victor had been murdered. He went out at night to buy medicine for his young son, Meso, when three thugs stabbed him in the stomach and snatched his cell phone. He died later that night in Kenyatta Hospital.
When I visited Little Bees twice in early February, sadness filled the air. I learned that Victor, who was survived by a young wife and two young children, was Mama Lucy’s fourth born son, out of 15 children. She had never mentioned that Victor was her child. She didn’t want me to think that he had been promoted out of nepotism, but instead because of his abilities, devotion and dedication to the children – the ‘little bees’.
Victor was buried on 12 February at his birthplace in Kisumu, in Kenya’s Western province at a funeral attended by hundreds of mourners.
How this slum school survives on so little is a miracle, but how it will survive without Victor I don’t know.
Living in a Nairobi slum where the conditions of life are unspeakable in 2011 – overcrowding, inadequate housing, the paucity of basic services, the lack of quality health care, combined with high levels of violence and insecurity – where a life is reduced to a cell phone – is nothing short of a human rights abuse.
Victor was robbed of his phone and paid for it with his life. And Mama Lucy was robbed of a son, the school was robbed of devoted role model and leader, and humanity was robbed of a hero.
Please let us know if you would like to make a contribution to the Little Bees School, which can either be done through Lifeline Energy or sent directly to Mama Lucy.
Radio remains the most important communications medium in sub-Saharan Africa, especially so in Southern Sudan. With electricity, cellular coverage and Internet restricted to a handful of cities in an area the size of Texas, radio remains the only technology that can reach isolated groups. That said, batteries outside towns and trading posts are hard to come by and expensive, making rural communities even harder to reach.
Picture courtesy T Thielen
From late 2006 to 2008, Lifeline Energy shipped 265,000 of our solar and wind-up radios to Southern Sudan in support of a broad-based civic education initiative spearheaded by the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The radios were deployed to support Let’s Talk, a 30-minute weekly programme covering a host of issues – political transition, rights and responsibilities in a democracy, the new constitutional framework and political processes. Providing listening access through our power-independent radios not only helped ensure access for women and youth, but also enabled people to listen to topics of interest like the weather, news and educational broadcasts. Let’s Talk was broadcast on Sudan Radio Service and Miraya FM, the south’s most popular station.
In a country with less than 50 miles of paved roads, delivering these huge consignments was no easy task, as evidenced by the trucks transporting radios stuck in the mud on the Juba-Yei road. The responsibility of distributing the radios fell to NDI’s partner NGOs working in the southern states for use by listening groups.
Juba-Yei road
Our project manager, Chhavi Sharma, and I travelled to Juba in February 2008 to work with NDI’s on-the-ground partners to help create a training programme. Although I had been to Khartoum, it was my first trip to the south. The training, attended by about 40 local and international NGO staff of the partner NGOs, took place in a community centre overlooking the Nile. Literacy levels in Southern Sudan are some of the lowest in the world and for women, literacy is an appalling 8%. Therefore, the training had to be highly visual and pictorial. Teachers and community leaders were identified as radio guardians, but we understood that many might never have operated a radio before.
Radio training programme in Juba
The lack of infrastructure makes feedback difficult to obtain. However, I am confident that our blue radios have made a positive difference to people’s engagement in this week’s referendum to decide whether or not Southern Sudan should become Africa’s 53rd state.
I have watched with immense interest the television images of the long and patient queues of high spirited women and men wearing their best clothes and baking for hours in the sun waiting to stamp their thumbprints on the ballot paper. It brought back fond memories of 1994, when I waited for several hours myself to vote in South Africa’s first democratic elections on the second of three election days. The role that radio played in informing around those elections cannot be underestimated either.
Dr Peter Friess, President of the Tech Museum of Innovation, with the Lifeline radio
By Kristine Pearson in Santa Clara
What a thrill to attend the 10th annual Tech Museum of Innovation Awards in Santa Clara on Saturday night. I was absolutely gob smacked that Peter Friess, the head of Silicon Valley’s Tech Museum walked on stage winding a Lifeline radio. Peter talked about the success of the Lifeline radio and Lifeline Energy (well, Freeplay Foundation, as we were known then) as the first winner of this award in 2001 and then excerpts of my acceptance speech was played. I had no idea they were going to do this. What a huge honour it was to be formally recognized by the Tech Museum again.
This was the first time the gala was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center and was the largest attendance ever at 1,800 guests. Many attendees were legends in Silicon Valley’s tech community. Everyone had come to find out who the five winners would be and also to hear Queen Rania al Abdullah of Jordan.
Queen Rania of Jordan with Applied Materials CEO Mike Splinter
Queen Rania, this years’ James C. Morgan Humanitarian Award honouree, spoke purposefully, passionately and eloquently about the importance of education. She encouraged everyone to ‘dream the undreamt’ and to ‘imagine the unimaginable’.
After dinner the award winners were announced from a field of three finalists laureates in five categories:
• Intel Environment Award – Peer Water Exchange, a project of Blue Planet Network – Worldwide
• BD Biosciences Economic Development Award – Alexis T. Belonio, Center for Rice Husk Energy Technology
• Microsoft Education Award – BBC World Service Trust, BBC Janala
• The Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award – A Single Drop for Safe Water
• Nokia Health Award – Venkatesh Mannar, Micronutrient Initiative
In this year’s education category I was delighted that one of our partners, the BBC World Service Trust, won for their English language mobile phone programming in Bangladesh.
Kristine Pearson accepting the first Tech Museum of Innovation Award in 2001
The Tech Awards have grown over the years into the world’s premiere awards for technology benefitting humanity and it will always be our honour to have been the very first winner. The iconic Lifeline radio – which is now retired and has been replaced by the Prime – is a featured display at the Tech Museum in Silicon Valley.
Gladys Kadogomoses’ big blue radio works perfectly after more than four years of constant use by her and her ladies’ listening group. She told me with great affection what it had meant to her – how she learned so much about health, nutrition and women’s rights; how she followed events during the frightening unrest in 2008 on the BBC; how she listened to the debates around the referendum; and most importantly about the programmes that told her about the medicines she needed to take and when to take them – because Gladys is HIV positive.
I first met gracious and friendly Gladys just after she had been diagnosed. She told me openly that she felt hopeless, ashamed and contemplated suicide because her deceased truck-driver husband, had left her nothing other than a disease. Then she joined the women’s self-help group Vumilia (perseverance in Swahili) and met weekly with other women in similar circumstances. With support, encouragement, and acceptance coupled with anti-retroviral drugs, she began to put her life back together.
In 2006 Gladys received a Lifeline radio along with 30 other positive women. She was the only one not a grandmother.
This was the first time since then that I had been back to Vumilia, which is in Kabras, just north of Kakamega in Western Kenya. On the weekend, I visited Gladys in her home to find out about her first night with her Lifelight. The day before she and 30 other women, participated in a Lifelight workshop.
Gladys beamed when she told me that her three children shared the light to study and for the first time she could see properly at night to read her Bible. Also for the first time, they used the pit latrine after dark, feeling safe from snakes and being able to see. She said, “without this light, at night we are otherwise forced to use a small white bucket.”
In addition, she spoke about the savings on paraffin that she would make. Gladys, like most women I’ve met who live in poverty, buy paraffin daily in small amounts. She spends anywhere from 20-40 Kenya shillings (25-50 US cents) per day averaging KS10,950 annually or a staggering $135. When the children study for exams she buys enough for light three lights. With the Lifelight, her savings will be significant.
Vumilia’s founder, Rose Ayuma Moon, who grew up in the Kabras area, established in 2004. Although she lives in Nairobi, she set up Vumilia because she saw how the skyrocketing HIV/AIDS pandemic was disrupting the lives of alarming numbers in her community and at that time the government was doing very little. Today Vumilia provides health and psycho-social support to 200 HIV positive women – all but two are grannies. In addition, Rose, who tirelessly and heroically divides her time between Kabras and Nairobi, also established the Vulmilia Home for Orphaned Girls, a residential facility for 22 girls aged 3-16 in 2006.
I first met Sonia in October 2009 when she received her Lifelight. She was shy for her age and wore her best Sunday yellow church dress with frills and lace to the distribution session held at a local community hall. Just barely 14, she became the head of her household last September when her mother died of TB. Her father died in August. Sonia looks after her two year old sister, Salah, who clung tightly to Sonia’s leg. Their grandmother, birthed 16 of her own children, is frail but has taken in three other orphaned grandchildren. The Grandmother also looks after Salah during the day, enabling Sonia to remain in school.
We arrived unannounced at Sonia’s small, two-roomed traditional mud and thatch house in the late afternoon just as the black sky threatened a downpour. She was using her Lifelight to make schoolwork revisions in her cramped sitting room which is no more than a metre wide and two metres long. Since having her light, Sonia says that she can study inside day or night and feels much safer as she can see predators like spiders and rats when making her bed. She also uses the light to walk safely to her grandmother’s house 100 metres away. Sonia told me that her light has become her ‘guardian protector’.
For nearly three years, I’ve been focusing on understanding the use of firewood, kerosene and candles by vulnerable children and women in sub-Saharan Africa. I often write and speak about how kerosene, outside South Africa, is largely unregulated in sub-Saharan Africa and of its dangers. The havoc it wreaks on people’s lives in their quest to have light after dark is not widely reported.
This week my colleague, Phil Goodwin, and I distributed Lifelights to child-heads of households between the ages of 13 and 20 and asked them my usual list of questions. But I heard something that I have never heard before. Alarmingly, they are buying diesel fuel instead of kerosene or mixing the two together because it is cheaper. Diesel is even more toxic and flammable than kerosene and this new development is very worrying. The children told us that they dig in neighbour’s fields to earn money, and the three things that they buy are lighting fuel (kerosene or diesel) by the tablespoon, salt and soap. When they have no money, they use firewood for light.
Each of the 12 children were thrilled to receive their light, saying that this light would free them from the dangers of liquid fuel and give them safe light in which cook, wash, study and walk after dark. Being able to make their bed and to see bugs, snakes or rats before getting into it, as they generally sleep on the ground, gave them comfort and they broke out into spontaneous applause.
ground in two months than I did in a year of graduate school. When I first started, I knew that much of sub-Saharan Africa was off the grid, but I hadn’t conceptualized what this meant for daily lives. For example, I didn’t realize that millions are still lighting their homes and fueling their stoves with kerosene. Kristine’s blog really highlighted the dangers of kerosene for me as well. Some of the statistics about energy poverty are staggering. The fact that some people are forced to spend 40 to 60 percent of their income on kerosene makes it impossible to break the cycle of poverty. The gender dimensions of energy poverty are also sobering, as is women’s lack of access to information in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, both of which Lifeline Energy addresses.
