blog

Borehole Solarisation and Payment Enforcement in Rural Tanzania

SVRG is carrying this InnovateUK Energy catalyst round 9 project out together with our Tanzanian partners, OMASI, and an additional partner from Uganda, ApTech Africa ltd, to build on the success of our original ECR6 Sustainable Integrated Community Energy innovation project. Project Overview From 2019-2022 in Northern Tanzania, SVRG and OMASI collaborated on an Energy …

Borehole Solarisation and Payment Enforcement in Rural Tanzania Read More »

Pay-N-Pump 2.0 – adding storage to mobile solar irrigation systems

SVRG is carrying this InnovateUK Energy catalyst round 9 project out together with our Ugandan partners, ApTech Africa ltd, to build on the success of our original ECR7 Pay-N-Pump innovation project. Project Overview PAY-N-PUMP is an innovative smart digital pay-as-you-go water-pumping and irrigation solution for small scale farmers in Uganda, built in a push-cart format, …

Pay-N-Pump 2.0 – adding storage to mobile solar irrigation systems Read More »

Mobile Minigrids – Community Site Survey Report

Smart Villages Research Group and project partners Chemolex surveyed more than 11 remote communities in Central and Western Kenya to find a suitable location for trialling of a mobile minigrid system. The report linked below outlines their key research findings. The Maasai Mara communities around Narok proved most promising, as these were the only ones …

Mobile Minigrids – Community Site Survey Report Read More »

Challenging Assumptions through Community Engagement

At Smart Villages Research Group, we truly believe in the importance of a community-led approach. We always start by asking the community to tell us about the challenges they’re facing, through focus groups and service value tests. This helps us ensure that any technology or system we develop will definitely provide value to the community, …

Challenging Assumptions through Community Engagement Read More »

Removing Plastic from Kenya’s Rivers – Year 2 Report

We were so excited to be able to join our Kenyan partners Chemolex again in September 2021, once international travel restrictions had begun to ease, to see the tremendous progress being made on river plastic cleanup, and to sit down together to solve some interesting challenges in the project. Once again, amazing results have been …

Removing Plastic from Kenya’s Rivers – Year 2 Report Read More »

Climate Change is Real

We often hear on the radio and news about how climate change is disproportionately affecting countries in the Global South. Although the effects are slowly reaching us in Europe, they are rarely life-threatening, only mildly inconvenient or unusual. For our partners in Tanzania and Uganda, it is harrowing to hear first-hand how their friends and …

Climate Change is Real Read More »

Mobile Minigrids for Rapid Rural Energy Access

The Challenge Rural communities in the developing world often require access to high-power equipment, such as for flour milling or welding, but to run these services can require power at the minigrid-scale of more than 10kW. When this equipment is not running, the baseline demand for power is extremely low (a typical solar home system …

Mobile Minigrids for Rapid Rural Energy Access Read More »

Trusting Time Estimates from Focus Groups

When running focus groups in Uganda, our partners noticed significant discrepancies in the answers that the community members were giving during the focus groups in comparison to the responses they’d given when baseline surveys had been conducted by the Ugandan team over the past few weeks. They challenged the community to explain why they were …

Trusting Time Estimates from Focus Groups Read More »

Weather Reporting from Uganda

I’m proud to report that we have set up the first Weather Net WiFi connected weather station in the whole of Uganda, allowing us to monitor the solar irradiation at our Matugga solar site and compare it to the output power of the panels. This will help us with spotting problems and evaluating the effectiveness …

Weather Reporting from Uganda Read More »

Martin Kariongi, in his own words

As we remember our friend, Martin Saning’o Kariongi, who passed away this week from coronavirus, we wanted to collect together some of the material that we, and others, have on the internet featuring Martin talking about his work.

Language and Education Barriers in Community Engagement

The SVRG approach is grounded in community engagement and human centred design, to ensure the systems we install bring real, lasting benefit. Unfortunately, due to language barriers, we are unable to run focus groups ourselves, but rely on our in-country partners to assist with translation, or with running the entire group following training. Our translators …

Language and Education Barriers in Community Engagement Read More »

Scroll to Top