Africa stories are been written every day and is has many surprises. A recent British news service Reuters story on how religious sisters in the Democratic Republic of Congo built a hydroelectric power plant in her town is testimony to the impressive ingenuity of some religious in Africa who have worked with generous doors and engineers to similarly harness this cheap and efficiently power sources to improve the lives of the communities they serve.
The sisters were tired of costly fuel powered generators that were susceptible to frequent power cuts. Sister Alphonse Ciza and her convent in the eastern Congo city of Miti and convent raised in the Eastern Congolese city of Miti raised dollars 297.000 to build the plant. The new facility powers not only the convent but also the church two schools and a clinic all free of charge. Sister Alphonsine 55, used skills she had learnt from studying mechanical engineering to help accomplish the project, which among the benefits provides students at Mitis Madeleo secondary school to now learn computer skills from screens rather than books. Electricity continues to be a luxury in many parts of Africa, hampering development, preventing adequate health care and making it harder for millions to escape poverty. Only 42 per cent of the continents population has electricity access and that fails to around 8 per cent in rural areas, according to the World Bank.
Some of the first to recognize the benefits of small scale hydropower were religious communities. At a rural schools in Tanzania run by German Benedictines the Sanikt Ottilien missionary monks of Ndanda Abbey had Swiss engineers installed a mini hydroelectric power plant almost 30 years ago. The force of gravity on the water is harnessed to power a turbine a so called run of the river power plant that provides electricity to the abbey, a secondary school, and engineering college factory. It is hard to imagine how these facilities would have run satisfactorily without such a reliable and cost free power supply and Ndanda Abbey is the only one to have done the same and especially impressive is what the Benedict Sisters of St Agnes in the town of Chipele have achieved.
The Benedictines sisters organized the complex logistics from Tanzania’s main port of Dar es salam to the construction site and the new plant, once in operation, replaced the expensive and unreliable diesel generators the town had been relying upon. The tullla hydroelectric plant, built by companies in Austria and Switzerland, now produce as impressive 36 gigawatts a year with the capacity to increase that by almost 25per percent. The Benedictines sisters from Chipole are a great extent responsible for the success of the projects wrote Roland Gruber. Earlier this month the World Bank released its Electricity Access in Sub Saharan Africa report. The report measures the status quo of access to electricity and identifies some root impediment to increasing access to electricity in sub Saharan Africa.
The report gives an idea of how far Africa is lagging compared to the world and the variation within the continent. Its current average 43 percent accessed rate to electricity is half of the global access rate of 87 percent. The report also warns that the current number of people without electricity will continue with Africa’s population boom. While the cost is negligent for all advanced economies, for most African economies it is substantial and far more burdensome than for the rest of the world. The report highlights expensive utility service cost as a barrier to electricity access. Another impediment the report investigates is how electricity outages influence employment, the strong negative relationship between more outages and employment reduces the probability of employment by approximately 35 percent in a community
By Prof Joseph Adero Ngala