Rework Energy: solar aid reworks electricity in the village – East Africa and Latin America

Solar Aid

Rework Energy: rural energy foundation wants to raise awareness about the benefits of solar power in Africa.

Rural Energy Foundation

Rework Finance: the FSDT has been established to support Tanzania’s development of pro-poor financial markets.

FSDT

Rework Skills: Femina HIP is the civil society initiative behind the Fema magazine, the most popular magazine in Tanzania.

Femina HIP

TaTEDO

TaTEDO

TaTEDO, the Tanzanian Traditional Energy Development Organization, works nationally to advance access to integrated renewable energies in rural Tanzania. Working through a variety of technologies, from solar power and rural solar markets, to biogas and more efficient wood stoves, TaTEDO is a leading organization rethinking how to scale up renewable energy markets for the poor.

The challenges are big, not least because the solution requires a mix of the right technologies, the upfront costs for poor people to afford them, and the entrepreneurial skills to build successful small businesses around them.

‘Energy policy in Tanzania is set at the national level’ says Oscar Lema, who leads TaTEDO’s work on energy entrepreneurship, ‘and to think about providing energy through enterprise at a local level we need to coordinate the policies, technology options, finance, business skills, and the different groups that provide them.’

Top-down approaches to energy pl anning are not accelerating local capacity and grassroots innovation. So in 27 districts throughout the country, TaTEDO is advancing new district-level energy frameworks, by facilitating small working groups that bring together government, community-based organizations, skill programmes, finance providers, and rural entrepreneurs.

In the village of Vingunguti, for example, a group of young people that have been trained by TaTEDO on how to build clean stoves have formed an enterprise that designs and produces more efficient coal stoves, the primary form of cooking in the country.

Against all odds, this small business is now producing 15.000 stoves a month and employing 40 young artisans. This is possible because TaTEDO has brought finance providers into the equation. Their collaboration with Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOS) and actors implementing the Village Community Banks (VICOBA) have been first explorative steps towards what Oscar Lema calls ‘building local level institutional structures’ for scaling up energy access in rural areas.

There is much work to be done to strengthen the conditions for local financial services for the poor, where initiatives such as the Financial Sector Deepening Trust (FSDT) are playing a key role. Moving to more robust financial services for the poor is seen as an essential blocks on which to build new energy alternatives.

How actors such as TaTEDO can scale up these ideas while tapping effectively into government policy and infrastructures for skills education, energy and rural development is a challenge ahead for reworking energy markets.