daniel chigunwe
A highly imaginative and innovative programme to provide a small solar installation for more than one million rural homesteads over the next five years will dramatically upgrade the quality of life of the rural majority of Zimbabweans and compresses decades of development into half a decade.
The installations comprise solar panels, an inverter, battery and cabling and will be large enough to ensure the household can run lights, radios, a television, phone chargers, a laptop, small refrigerator, submersible pump and a wifi modem.
This is the essential electrical core of any modern household, but other sources of energy will be needed for the high demand heating, water heating and cooking, and operation of power tools.
But it does mean that 200 000 rural households a year move up the ladder to the same level of quality of life enjoyed by modest urban households, and in these days of heavy load-shedding perhaps a higher quality of life.
The rural electrification programme introduced in 1983, and expanded and formalised during the 1980s and 1990s along with a levy on all electricity sales to provide financing, was built around extending the national distribution grid of what is now the Zimbabwe Electricity Distribution and Transmission Company to every rural centre and from there to every rural homestead, a sort of giant extension of what had been done with the few thousand white commercial farmers since the Second World War.
This required, in the end, having the substations and overhead wires going everywhere, a very expensive process which is why the levy was introduced to pay for the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of wiring. There has been progress, and sometimes significant progress as business centres were wired in, but we were far from having basic power at every home.
More recently, the Rural Electrification Fund has been installing what it calls mini-grids for a single village, with solar panels, inverter, batteries and cabling to each home and small business to provide the basic requirements.
The Presidential Rural Solarisation Project approved by Cabinet this week may well be a dramatic extension of this programme, or might well see individual installations at each homestead.
A lot will no doubt depend on location and how far apart houses are, as cabling costs can be large.
We stress that this project is a dramatic improvement in the quality of life, rather than the standard of living which tends to concentrate on purely economic measures.
As modern technologies, such as solar panels, smart phones, satellite internet connections and the like are exploited, Africans can jump many decades of development in one bound without having to repeat all the intermediate steps used in say much of Europe and North America.
The cost per person and per household of these dramatic jumps is quite small, even when measured against the modest gross national products per capita of most African countries, but the effect is dramatic. So a small upgrade in standard of living correctly applied produces a huge upgrade in quality of life.
We believe that there can be improvements, if only optional improvements, to the now approved scheme.
This would probably require loan funds that suitable households could access to extend the basic solar facility, add in a water tank and add a solar water heater.
Loans would have to be repaid but many rural families are now moving into the world of regular incomes, at least annual incomes.
For example, tobacco farmers across that tobacco belt, and the growing number of small-scale farmers growing oil seeds and cotton, plus the upgrades of cattle farming and horticulture, mean that an imaginative loan scheme, with annual repayments when the cash crops are sold rather than the monthly repayments of those with salaries, would be viable.
There are limits to what the Government can finance, and making sure that everyone has the minimum is the right start, but some of the private sector and more commercial partners could also look at what families could add on to this minimum and be open to far more imaginative financing arrangements than what they think is a good idea for the urban types on monthly salaries.
The extension of this household basic scheme could also be applied in urban areas.
In the upper income suburbs solar installations while far from ubiquitous are at least common, driven to a large extent by the Zesa load shedding of recent years.
Some households have gone full-scale with solar panels for the light load, plus solar water heaters for one set of the heavy loads, and then cooking on gas so Zesa becomes just a back up.
Again more households would join this movement if reasonably cheap financing was available and Zesa should encourage the move, as with a lot of consumers who are able to cope without much Zesa would mean that less in the way of new power stations would be needed, although major industrial and commercial consumers will always require national grid power.
In the end, most households will want both their own solar power and water heating, but would also want a Zesa connection for cooking and other heavy load applications, so it is not choosing one but rather having both.
This means that the continuing expansion of the grid into new urban housing areas and into at least the rural business centres and growth points, where local industries will be based, must continue since a welder, for example, needs more than a couple of solar panels.
But at the same time we can do in five years what a normal conventional expansion of the grid to every home might take decades to accomplish, so the Presidential Rural Solarisation Project, along with the Presidential Village Borehole Scheme, are the needed shortcuts to ensure that every Zimbabwean home has that basic quality of life, electric lights and a water tap, expected in an upper middle income society by the 2030 deadline.
