Bringing electricity to fishing communities on Lake Victoria

Dotted around the shores of Lake Victoria are hundreds of villages that depend on fishing. As night falls, thousands of fisherman row out on boats to catch omena, nile perch and tilapia. The lake lights up like a city, as a thousand paraffin lamps flicker through the night, attracting omena fish to the surface so fishermen can sweep them up in their nets.

Grid electricity is not available or affordable in these villages which means that the catch must be sold within hours, before the fish rot. Ice filled trucks arrive in the morning to take away the night’s catch to be sold in fish markets as far away as Europe.

I’ve recently spent a few days visiting some of these villages to scope out the potential for a project to install wind and solar systems that can power cold storage for the fish and charging stations for electric lights. I was with a group of university professors and two NGOs that we are partnering with to design this project. In our interviews, we talked with Beach Management Units (BMU). Each bay as a BMU that everyone involved in the fish trade are members belong. From experience, we had decided not to approach the fishing villages to tell them our ideas, but rather gather information, understand their greatest challenges, and understand the suitability of an energy project and how it might fit.

Establishing cold storage facilities would enable the fisherman to have greater bargaining power, enabling to sell at reasonable rates on their terms. The other major energy opportunity is providing renewably powered lights for omena fishing boats. Omena are small fish, caught at night time and dried during the day. They are used in cooking but also as feed for chickens and other animals (we feed omena to our cat and he loves it).

So what’s the opportunity for replacing paraffin lights with electric lights charged during the day from renewables? Each omena fishing boat has four fishermen and four paraffin lamps that are used all night. The fuel cost is significant, around KSh 600 per night (about US$7). For a typical village such as Got Kachola, this amounts to over a daily expenditure of KSh 21,000 per night. At this price, renewable energy quickly becomes within easy reach.

We aren’t the first to think of this. Osram are an organisation that have built solar powered charging stations that lease out solar lamps to locals. When interviewing the fisherman, they spoke highly of the idea, but most complained that the solar lamps could not hold enough charge to last the night. So the challenge is to provide longer-lasting lights, and get them within easy reach of the fishing communities (Osram stations aren’t always located nearby).

There’s one other important benefit to getting affordable electricity into the fishing villages. The fisherman we interviewed often talked about a trend of declining catches: overfishing on Lake Victoria is occurring and well-recognised. To try and manage this, there is an omena fishing ban from April-September. Some fishermen probably ignore the ban, but most switch to catching tilapia and nile perch, or continue on the Ugandan shores where no ban exists. Declining fish stocks means declining jobs and these villages don’t have many other means of income. Providing electricity provides opportunities for new businesses, for example, video stores, barber shops, manufacturing facilities. This is an indirect but important reason why fishing communities need affordable, clean electricity.

Urban animals in Kampala. Some pretty, some not so pretty. The turkey paroles outside my uncle’s compound and is nick-named satan. I don’t think it’s as ugly as the marabou storks though, man they are the ugliest creature I’ve ever seen!

After a sweaty Friday afternoon spent running around Kisumu buying car hub bearings, copper and other oddities for the access:energy workshop, I jumped on a bus bound for Busia, a town that sits on the Kenya-Uganda border. I met with Garret, an adventurous fellow that works for IPA. We stayed the night at the IPA house in Busia and arose early the following morning to head into Uganda. Garret rides a motorbike which I had a backie on until finding a matatu (known as a taxi in Uganda) to take me to Jinja. There, we met a few other folks from Kampala (a trainee doctor called Mara, and two researchers, Steve and Sid) and headed for a relaxing weekend away on a little island resort called the Hairy Lemon.

A short canoe ride guided us to the island and it took a game of frisbee golf with the owner of the Island and resort before I realised that it could be circumnavigated in just 5 minutes. It was a beautiful spot. We grabbed some beers and spent the afternoon wallowing about in the Nile and reading our books. This was the general theme for the weekend - a chance to unwind, rest, talk, laugh, and play games. It was clear the Hairy Lemon was designed for nothing other than this. My favourite part was the vollyball, which they had set up in the river.

So I’m feeling refreshed from a thoroughly enjoyable weekend in excellent company. I grabbed a lift to Nairobi with the others and I’m now sitting on the Kamba bus back to Kisumu. Unfortunately, it arrives at the less-refreshing time of 2am.

A few years ago, the Stockholm Environment Institute released a paper on planetary boundaries. I failed to rouse much interest from friends about the paper, but it had me tremendously excited. It provided me with a much needed framework to describe how climate change isn’t the only major threat of our lifetimes, there are several others, and each one can be considered to have a safety boundary. Together with climate change, there are two other planetary boundaries we have crossed, these are exceeding safe levels of nitrogen extraction from the atmosphere (to produce fertilisers for crops and animal feed) and biodiversity loss. By illustrating this (see picture) we have a platform for talking more holistically about solutions, and can make sure we don’t miss gaping holes in our environmental policies.

But there is one gaping hole that is continually exploited by corporations and journalists. This is the supposed incompatibilities of pursing environmental goals with social justice. I know that badly put together environmental policies can exacerbate social justice, but is this idea really true in general? That’s exactly what Oxfam has been discussing in the run up to the Rio Summit.

Oxfam’s have just released a discussion paper that explores the dynamics of living within safe environmental limits and within acceptable levels of human deprivation, and illustrates the concept in a doughnet (see picture).

Individually, none of the ideas or data is new, but the report is a great step towards tying together some of the top-level discussions around social justice and the environment. It also does well to explain the all important question: what happens to the environment when poor countries start consuming more? Here’s what the data suggests:

• Food: Providing the additional calories needed by the 13 per cent of the world’s population facing hunger would require just 1 per cent of the current global food supply.
• Energy: Bringing electricity to the 19 per cent of the world’s population who currently lack it could be achieved with less than a 1 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions.
• Income: Ending income poverty for the 21 per cent of the global population who live on less than $1.25 a day would require just 0.2 per cent of global income.

Meeting basic human needs such as food security, energy and income poverty must be done in tandem with a greater global equity in the use of natural resources. The greatest reductions have to come from the world’s richest consumers. Unfortunately, as George Monbiot writes in his blog, “the politically easy way to tackle poverty is to try to raise the living standards of the poor while doing nothing to curb the consumption of the rich. This is the strategy almost all governments follow. It is a formula for environmental disaster”.

All this has motivated me to work for BioRegional and access:energy, two organisations that I believe understand the dynamics between environmental limits and global equity. BioRegional is an organisation that invented the One Planet Living framework, which helps people design sustainability action plans that are holistic and ambitious (in line with a sustainable and globally equitable level of consumption). access:energy is a social enterprise based in Kenya that designs and manufactures affordable, locally-made, clean energy technologies (focussing on wind turbines).

Sources

Oxfam (2012), A safe and just space for humanity. Can we live within the doughnut?

Monbiot (2012), Is protecting the environment incompatible with social justice? Featured on the Guardian Blog.

SEI (2009), Planetary Boundaries: A safe operating space for humanity. Featured in the Nature Journal.

The graphic explained: The social foundation forms an inner boundary, below which are many dimensions of human deprivation. The environmental ceiling forms an outer boundary, beyond which are many dimensions of environmental degradation. Between the two boundaries lies an area – shaped like a doughnut – which represents an environmentally safe and socially just space for humanity to thrive in. It is also the space in which inclusive and sustainable economic development takes place.

Classic scene from Nuts In May. A British film by Mike Leigh.

I’m feeling some hefty musical cravings at the moment. It’s not that I don’t listen to music everyday, but I miss the adventure of discovering music. With limited Internet, I can no longer roam freely across cyberspace like I used to, downloading random bass music podcasts at a whim, or greedily snatching obscure albums from blogs such as WFMU.

It’s not just an Internet limitation, it’s physical too. I miss the feeling of holding music, gazing at the artwork of album sleeves and sitting down to read the sleeve notes. Then there’s the ritual of taking vinyl from sleeve to platter, hearing amplified dust particles crackle as the needle works it’s way to the first beat. Then the music itself.

The extent of my cravings became apparent after my friend Forest teased me with an email of his current musical pleasures, including several links to youtube videos. One such tune was the Don Pullen George Adams Quartet - Serenade for Sariah, a piece of jazz that bustles at a pace that makes Kenyan runners look slow. In the words of Forrest:

On the jazz front we have to give it up right away to the post-bop piano virtuoso Don Pullen, who together with tenor sax man George Adams and their quartet, swept through a series of bad-nasty European live and recording dates in the eighties. I’m loving their 1986 Blue Note album Breakthrough  at the moment, complete with liner notes by Amiri Baraka, who praises their ‘mutually enfunkifying balance’ and shit, but samples are, as is so often the case, not available on YouTube for licensing reasons, so another recording will have to do…Great band though.

Then I found a couple of East African music blogs a few days ago. A directory of East African vinyl and an African music blog called Likembe. I ashamed to say that I haven’t delved into the Kenyan music scene. I truly believe there is good music to be unearthed here, but I imagine it’s hidden deep. These reading materials should help. Let the journey begin.