Nov/Dec 2020 Trip Video – Uganda
A video showing some highlights from our most recent trip to Uganda, aiming to give you a flavour of our everyday work out on the field.
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A Solar powered Electric Milling Machine
Many of the communities we work with are agricultural, with maize flour contributing to an integral part of their diet. In the rural Maasai Tanzanian communities we work with, villagers often have to travel miles to neighbouring towns to access a diesel milling machine. Once there, they can face long waiting periods for sufficient customers …
Award-Winning Employees!
We’re pleased and immensely proud to announce that Natasha Wilson, one of our development engineers who joined in July 2020, has been awarded the Institute of Mechanical Engineer’s (IMechE) Scholarship Visionary Award 2020, for her drive to use engineering as tool for positive change and development. Here’s her acceptance video, filmed in Uganda on the …
A Personal Recount of Challenging Travel through Heavy Rains and Political Campaigns
Something we realised during our most recent trip to Uganda, is the importance of timing visits according to the seasons and political rallies. This personal recount is adapted from notes written during the trip: 19/11/2021 Just as we arrived in Kampala, we found out there’d been protests following the arrest of Bobi Wine, a presidential …
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Bucket-mounted Solar Systems
Solar panel systems can be expensive and time-consuming to build. They can require specialist knowledge to set up, and be difficult to maintain. In rural communities, it can make a huge difference if a solar panel system can be made simply and at a lower cost. That’s why Smart Villages is always on the lookout …
Grid extension in Tanzania
On our most recent trip to Tanzania, the number of half-fallen trees was quite noticeable. I thought nothing of it at first, even though several of them were lying across the roads. They could have been damaged in storms? That was until we realised that they were all under newly erected grid electricity lines. The …
Rural Perceptions of Solar Power
Although our first solar installation in rural Tanzania has been having overwhelmingly positive reviews by the local community (powering the local water borehole, the first fridge in the local shop, and a small, efficient, electric milling-machine) we still have a hard time explaining the concept of solar power to some of our other target communities. …
An Intro to Rural Tanzanian Schools
Trying to get a good education in the rural communities with which we work in Tanzania is a real challenge. With classes of 80 students, insufficient chairs, classrooms and equipment, no electricity or running water, lack of funds to buy textbooks, and some parents encouraging their children to fail the pre-secondary exams so they don’t …
Sustainable Offgrid EdTech for the Developing World
This project is funded by InnovateUK, the UK’s Innovation Agency. In the communities in which SVRG works, improving education is a high priority. Rural schools are often overcrowded, difficult to reach, and poorly resourced. Teachers are poorly paid, resulting in high rates of absenteeism among teachers at government schools. Existing educational material (for example free …
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Innovative Access to Healthcare for Impact in Remote Communities
STI4D, a sister company to SVRG, is carrying this project out jointly with our NGO partners in Tanzania, Orkonerei Maasai Social Initiatives (OMASI). This project is funded by InnovateUK, the UK’s Innovation Agency. Access to good healthcare is often challenging in the developing world, but this is greatly compounded for people living in remote off-grid …
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A Wood-Mounted solar array for the Tanzania’s Maasai Radio Station
The community radio station: Orkonerei Radio Service (ORS FM), is the first Maasai pastoralists’ radio and was established to better communicate with the Maasai in Terrat, Simanjiro district. For many Maasai who don’t understand Kiswahili or Maasai, it’s their only source of information and important for education on health and agriculture. At their peak, ORS …
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Animals in the Electronics!
Three days before our recent flight to Tanzania, we’d received word that the inverter installed at our 50kW solar array in Ormoti had stopped working. The local electrician was sent in to take a look, and found a lizard had somehow managed to crawl inside and fried its brains. He removed the lizard, thinking it …
First impressions at Ormoti, and a Maasai welcome
This post was written new SVRG team member Natasha, on her first day on site in the communities in Tanzania: We arrived at the Ormoti site, to scenes of Maasai men sat around, wrapped in their traditional cloth. The solar array installed by Bernie, Anna and Arran previously was way bigger than I’d imagined, with …
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Innovation Africa-style
One thing that the Smart Villages model is based on is the notion of “appropriate technology” – that is the use of technologies that are specified and optimised based on their context and utility, rather than their absolute efficiency or performance. The classic example is the use of, say, an off-the-shelf lead acid battery instead …
Unbalanced 3-phase power nearly killed the radio
So let’s start by stepping back a little. Our innovative partners, OMASI, have set up a number of different productive, social and community projects on their main site in the village of Terat in the Simanjiro District of Tanzania. There’s a shop, a community meeting hall, and a hostel (originally set up as somewhere for …
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Meetings with Remarkable Trees…
We were delighted to find that one of the many amazing things about working in the Maasai Plains of Simanjiro District, south of Arusha, is the indigenous baobab trees. The baobab, Adansonia digitata, is native to Africa, and classes as one of the biggest trees in the world. Whilst they “only” reach 25-30m in height, …
Solar Boma Systems should be a thing
For the Maasai, the traditional living unit is the boma. This is an extended, or multi-family compound surrounded by a thorn hedge (usually), which will contain between 3 and 10 houses. There is an inner circular compound, also surrounded by a thorn hedge, to keep the livestock safe during the night. Satellite photos of the …
Leena Chandran-Wadia: Are mini-grids the answer to rural electrification?
[:en] Interview with Leena Chandran-Wadia Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation Location: Bangalore, India “The day we can say that every home is electrified is very far away” ‘Kerala is totally electrified!’ run the headlines in the Indian papers. It’s a claim many Indian villages make, says Dr. Leena Chandran-Wadia, the Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation …
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It is not a village but people: Long Lamai, a case study of a smart village
Long Lamai is a Penan village in upper Baram, northern Sarawak, of Malaysian Borneo. Travelling to the settlement from the nearest town Miri takes eight hours on rough logging roads and an hour of hiking through the dense rainforest. Alternately, it is reachable by flying from Miri to Long Banga by an hour’s flight via …
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Energy for Displaced Communities: How could Smart Villages help?
There are 65.3 million forcibly displaced people and 21.3 million refugees, hosted across the world (UNHCR). “Few forcibly displaced people” have access to modern energy. Out of 8.7 million refugees and displaced people in camps, only 11% have access to “reliable energy sources for lighting” (Chatham House, 2015). However, forcibly displaced people and refugees are …
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