Solar Panels for Iringa, Tanzania 2024

My colleague K has just arrived in Iringa, Tanzania, to prepare for the arrival of the team.  He just sent back a photograph of the night sky which made us all envious.  Most of us have not been to too many places where you can just look up at night and take such a photograph just with a camera in a mobile phone.  Even in a country such as Rwanda, the night sky is often hazy enough to obscure most of the stars.  

This year I will not get to Tanzania.  But the team who is arriving this weekend will install 200 sets of solar panels in a remote village.  Tanzania is a big country, bigger in area than France, more than double the area of Germany.  

It is so wild you can wild animals from the highway driving through the country.  OK, the highway runs through a national park.  But where else does that happen?  

Iringa is a small town in the central part of Tanzania. It is served by 13-seat propeller planes from the air. And the village we are serving is more than 2 hours outside Iringa, about half of that on unpaved, dirt roads.  It is partly due to its remoteness that they do not have access to electrical power.  So our team will travel there by an 8-hour bus ride from Dar Es Salaam o the coast. 

This project is one of the most difficult to set up.  I went to Tanzania for the first time in 2018, to explore opportunities for projects.  In 2019, I went again with G and K, to Dodoma where we had found a good site an hour outside Dodoma and a good partner based in Dodoma. Suitable accommodation was found, and transportation arranged. Funding was already available. A project was planned for 2020.  And then, of course, Covid-19 hit and the project had to be cancelled.  Things happened and the original project in Dodoma is no longer possible, even after the pandemic.  

In 2023, we tried again.  This time we target Iringa, with another organization as a partner, and a new site, even more remote than the original one outside Dodoma.  But with some of the same people, except that they now work for different organisations.  

Looking back, it has taken us many years, multiple trips, and so much effort, to set up this project near Iringa.  I was really looking forward to going with the team, to see the project happen, to see the dream come true, for us, for the people there.  Unfortunately, it was not to be.  It turns out I cannot go this year because of commitments elsewhere.  But K is there and other colleagues are there with the students.  I am confident the project will be successful. I will be happy for it.  

In fact, for this year, other than the solar panel project, we also have two STEM education projects, and one English communication project in Tanzania.  We will review the situation after the summer and decide how to proceed.