My 'Final' Report

Thanks again to the Kathryn W. Davis for funding my work on the Solar Project! The Davis Foundation has published my final report on their site. But of course, this isn't exactly the final report. I leave at the end of October and have lots to do before then to ensure that everything falls into place and will continue to thrive after I leave. But for those interested, here is the to-date summary of my project:

Brightening Girls’ Futures with Solar Energy

Kenya

Kalamazoo College

Anne Baldwin (United States, Kalamazoo College)

anneatkgsa.blogspot.com

                This project’s aspiration is to empower girls, change gender attitudes and provide clean, reliable solar energy to Kibera slum by starting a solar assembling and marketing initiative and improving the science education at Kibera Girls Soccer Academy (KGSA). By learning about solar electronics and applying this knowledge to create a useful, high-quality, income-generating product, the KGSA girls will see the strength of their education and community activism and will be empowered to take their future into their own hands.

Arrival in Kenya and extensive research of the solar industry revealed that solar technologies are more available in Kenya than my pre-departure research indicated, thus leading me to restructure the products we were to build and sell at KGSA in several ways. First, my partners at Kibera Community Youth Program (KCYP) insisted that solar lighting was currently more marketable than phone charging and radio powering, as I initially planned in my grant proposal, so we instead made plans to build and market a small solar-LED lamp, which unfortunately has a higher cost of production than previously budgeted for. Second, finding that similar products did exist in Kenya, I needed to make sure that our product was competitive with these other lamps in order to ensure my project’s economic sustainability. Most solar companies in Kenya market large solar systems to for high-income customers that already have access to electricity. Though our partners at KCYP are the only ones in this niche market of small scale, affordable solar lighting in Kibera, there are a few companies marketing similar products in rural communities. Two of these companies sell a superior, hardier, more versatile and affordable product, and though these competing products are not in our local Kibera market yet, I wanted to ensure that I left the girls to a project that would not crumble if and when competition arrived. I first investigated the possibility of finding cheaper raw materials or redesigning our product so that we could out-compete these products while maintaining my original intention to have the girls selling the work of their own hands. Unfortunately, no redesign could lower the cost of production to enable us to out-compete these products because their low pricing was the result of large-scale, factory production. So instead, I formed a partnership with both those competitors so that we will be the official marketers in Kibera for both of these products: the Sun King Lantern (www.solanterns.com) and Thrive Energy Products (www.thriveenergy.co.in). This new project structure separates the educational and income-generating aspects of my project, but in doing so ensures the economic sustainability of the project. Finally, these new products are designed in a way that enables the girls to offer inexpensive lantern rental services (10-15 KSH per night). This will allow poorer demographics of Kiberans access to solar energy, replacing hazardous and unhealthy kerosene lanterns and enabling even the poorest of families to afford lighting for students to study by. 

The solar training worked beautifully in every way. The girls spent the first week of their August vacation with Sande Wycliffe and two assistants from KCYP. Having Kibera youth conduct the training was essential because the girls saw that people from their own community had been successful with this knowledge inspiring them to believe that they could too. Budget constraints forced me to focus the solar project on the KGSA students that would get the most out of the training: only the 21 students that selected to take physics as one of their science courses. The smaller group was useful because it allowed some of the more shy participants to get personal attention from the trainers and find their role in the group. The hands-on learning experience was wildly exciting to watch; every girl in the room lit up with excitement upon completing their own lamp. The lamps built during this training will be property of KGSA, available for any student to borrow to study for a night. During the rest of the vacation, the girls most interested in the project met to build a second lamp and discuss the future of the project. The girls themselves suggested formalizing our solar project into a Junior Achievement Company, like the KGSA Journalism Club. Junior Achievement (www.ja.org) is an NGO that teaches business through business by establishing self-sustaining, co-curricular companies run by students. Junior Achievement training will be starting in September and will help the girls establish a system of management, accounting, and a general framework for the company that will contribute significantly to the sustainability of this solar venture.

Another detail that became clear in the process of doing this project was that income generation and the computer literacy are both of major importance to KGSA. Since computer literacy is very much a part of complete science education in this era of information technologies and since the solar initiative generates income, I restructured my project to include improving KGSA’s computer education and to prioritize sustaining the income generation of the solar project. This led to a partnership with Jude Ndambuki of the Help Kenya Project (www.hkenyaproject.org), an NGO focused on bringing computers to Kenyan schools. Help Kenya Project fundraising, donations, and programs generously contributed to the sustainability of the solar project and the computer facilities of KGSA. Mr. Ndambuki was able to arrange a donation of computers and is making arrangements to set up two university students to work for a full year at KGSA through his Laptop Reward program. One student will be a computer science student in charge of giving regular computer skills lessons. The second student will be a business student working directly with the girls in the Solar Junior Achievement Company, ensuring that they are actively marketing and diligently accounting. This leadership will be doubled by Byronnes Khianga, a local businessman and ex-KGSA teacher that has taken special interest in the project, and by Boniface, the KGSA physics teacher, thus ensuring that this project will be active and income-generating for a long time to come.

And finally, I was able to equip the school with much needed textbooks and lab materials to improve the quality of KGSA’s science education. Though a private donor had recently built a modern lab facility at KGSA, we still lacked basic materials for physics labs and practical exams. Consequently, girls who took physics still were failing the lab portion of their classes. With grant funds we were able to buy a full set of physics lab materials, some glassware for chemistry classes, and a microscope for the biology. The girls helping me un-wrap the delivered materials were thrilled with the microscope especially, having never seen such an instrument before in their lives. Unlike chemistry where materials continually need replacing, physics labs have an incredibly low running cost once the initial materials are purchased, and I was honored to be able to afford these for my school. 

Despite the restructuring of the project, I feel that the economic partnerships and the system of leadership left behind ensure a bright future for the solar initiative. The computer facilities and instruction will equip the girls with the tools to innovate in the technology age. And the textbooks and equipment complete our science facilities, making it possible for KGSA students to achieve the test scores that will earn them scholarships to college.

While I was living in Kibera this summer, Kenya voted and approved a new constitution that provides the political infrastructure to mitigate corruption. In the buildup to the vote, there was worry that the post-election violence of 2007, that displaced thousands and resulted in violence in Kibera especially, would repeat itself. When the constitution passed without conflict, it was a phenomenal, momentous day in Kenyan history to enact such a powerful political framework and to do so peacefully despite differing tribal and personal interests. But one citizen interviewed on the news made and incredibly astute observation that has stuck with me since: “The absence of conflict does not constitute peace.” Every day that passes without any major conflict in Kibera does not necessarily signify peace. To me, peace is when people have the freedom to creat their own opportunity. When conflict results in violence and people don’t even feel safe living in their homes like in Kibera in 2007, they certainly don’t have this freedom. But even in a conflict-free Kibera, girls aren’t always free to a high-quality education or to have authority over their own marriage or body, so they don’t have that freedom either. They don’t have peace, even in a conflict-free Kibera. By giving girls the empowerment and the education to be active in their community and to achieve the grades to get a job or scholarship, they can create their own opportunities; they can have peace.

This project has created an enclave of peace at KGSA, fueled by 21 empowered girls, everyone in their community that they touch with their knowledge and confidence, and everyone that the project expands to after years of sustaining itself. What I realized in helping these girls start this project was that for all the poverty, insecurity and violence there is in Kibera, there is just as much opportunity, resilience and happiness. –Anne Baldwin