Rwanda mapping

Here we are, a 4-person advance team is in Rwanda to prepare for the big flagship project in July.  This year the project aims to do two things.  First is to install solar panels for 420 household so that they can have electricity for basic lighting, phone charging, small radio, etc.  Second is a local fashion project to train village tailors to make modern clothing for the underprivileged, integrating local garment designs and colours with modern techniques and styles.  

One of the core elements to the solar project is determining which households to serve, and where they are.  For the Rwanda countryside, there are no detailed street maps on which one can identify a house by street name and number.  Households are identified by district, sector, cell, village (with possibly 100+ households) and isibo (the lowest level of local government unit with dozens of households).  The precise location of each house is known only by the people who live there.  

Our partner, AEE Rwanda, works with the local government to identify the households that we serve: in the bottom two categories of poverty, who do not have electricity (from the power grid, or individual solar systems they purchased themselves or otherwise acquired).  A list of 420 household names across 5 villages is then complied.   Then we have to create a digital map of the precise geographical location of each and everyone of the houses.  Without which the installation cannot proceed.  That is the major task for the advance team during this week.  

Last year, we served 400 households at several villages near Lake Mugesara.  A pin marks a household, colour coded to the village.  This site is roughly 40 kilometres from Kigali.  But the last 20 kilometres are unpaved.  Hence it takes at least an hour and a half to get there from Kigali in a car, when there is not too much traffic on the road coming out from Kigali.   That digital map for the 400 households took about 3 days to create.  We have to walk up to the house, under the guidance of someone from the village, geo-code it on the digital map app, and put a physical label on the house so that the installation team can identify it later.  

This year we have to do he same for the new site, to the west of last year’s site.  At the moment identified only by 2 green pins representing two reference points in the site.  On the first day, we mapped out 143 houses.  We are on track to finish in 3 days.  Much much more work lie ahead.  We are all excited at the prospect.  

Until 2019, we had been installing solar panels to the north east of Kigali.  Near the very long dragon-like lake at the top of the map.  That is only 20+ kilometres from Kigali.  But mostly unpaved roads, over very hilly terrain,  We spent a lot of time hiking up and down steep hills.