Spreading the Light
This summer, I headed to California to assist One Million Lights as it tries to merge into public-private partnership model that will help it be a more sustainable organization, as it tries to reach its goal of distributing 1 million solar lanterns to impoverished communities around the world.
Before I left for summer I was very fortunate to apply and receive $28K grant from the Joan and Robert Gilkison Foundation toward three water projects in my district. So concurrently with my work at One Million Lights, I am currently coordinating the initiation of these projects. It is great joy to feel the anticipation by the villagers for clean water and to imagine how people’s lives will be transformed for the better.
At One Million Lights, we have been focusing on three main areas: Global Lights distributions (I have been coordinating light ambassadors around the world, especially those located in Africa and Asia), strengthening our public-private partnerships, and developing a new comprehensive Community Solar project.
We just received UN approval to distribute lights in Kakuma Refugee camp in Northern Kenya! Providing solar lanterns to individual tents and households at the campsite is a major help to these refugees who face many life’s difficulties just to make through each day.
We have also received some 1800 solar lanterns that I’m sending for distributing to impoverished schools in the Transmara Kenya.
These lights donations would not have been possible without our corporate sponsors. We have expanded to form partnerships with business corporations in order to create more predictable and sustainable sponsorships for our projects. We have good commitments from our current major corporate sponsor, Energizer and SunPower Corporation. We hope to add more corporate sponsors over the next few months.
One other exciting vision I have been tasked with is the creation of a unique comprehensive Community Solar project. We’ve dubbed it “Community Solar Asset” project. Please read the description below:
Community Solar Asset
At the core of community development is providing services that enable, stabilize and enrich the members of the community. All people and the communities we form have basic needs that underlie the ability of a community to survive and thrive. Many of these services are either made possible or better through access to electrical energy. The community solar asset uses local sustainable electrical generation (photovoltaic aka solar) to provide core services: education, food security, water security, health care and micro-enterprise A brief description of how the system provides these services, and potential applications of the platform are described later. First, I will briefly cover the capacity of the system and the communication abilities of the system, which are vital in providing the information to effectively operating and monitoring the system.
A key aspect of the system is the remote monitoring and metering of the system. It communicates over the SMS network to provide data to cloud based monitoring system that tracks and stores production and consumption data. Not only does that give a warning system for operational problems or system malfunction, it allows for rich data that tracks the utilization of the different functions of the system. By this means, we can see which services the community is accessing, track which members of the community are using these services and quantify to a specific level of detail the impact of the system on the community.
The ideology of the system to is enable best practice for usage of electrical power. Through practice we have seen applications of electrical power for uneducated public without incentive or access to capital usually pursue consumer technology and goods and create additional spending without relative increases to income and productive goods. To offset this trend the design of the proposed system to provide the infrastructure to enable productive usage of electricity, the program to incentivize its usage, the methodology to maximize its impact and the monitoring to track its application and effects.
The five core services the system provides electrical energy to improve are: education, water security, food security, health care, and micro-enterprise These essential systems form the core shared services of any communities and ensure that the community will locally generate the key aspects of its ongoing well being.
Together, these services create the framework for a robust, self-sufficient community infrastructure. When integrated with local management, community ownership and local adaptation it can be integrated as a key element providing most of the services government is expected to provide. Through leveraging monitoring we can ensure efficiency operations, minimal downtime, analyze use and also refine which uses are employed, the amount of benefit they generate for the community and the appropriate cost to any involved beneficiaries or investors.
2 Responses to “Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah’s AFE with One Million Lights in Palo Alto, CA”
Catherine Admay
Your explanation of the need to create the conditions in which communities can thrive through infrastructure like sure access to light or water is so helpful. Thank you for taking the time to lay out both practice and ideology, as you put it. On the ideology point for the community solar asset project, how much do the people in these communities agree with creating an incentive for the 5 core assets identified? Have you had the chance (or the funding!) to consult?
Also, have you heard reports yet of what the lights have enabled at Kakuma? I would expect that the number of burn injuries, particularly to young children and elderly people, has gone down. I know this is difficult to track–was anyone keeping track of the injuries to burn victims before the lights?–but if it could be tracked it would help to illuminate how light matters very substantively for health. I’ll never forget sitting with a grieving mother mourning the loss of her baby who had, in the dark, crawled too close to a boiling pot of water, tipped it over and been scalded to death. That day is the day I really “got” how much basic infrastructure matters for everyone. And it made a big difference to how I’ve lived afterwards. I think there’s another storybook you could write Kimeli (whenever you have the time and space for it!)
jacksonlekakeny
Pongezi ndugu mpendwa lwa kasi nzuri