Solar Microgrids in Tanzania:
Maasai Stoves & Solar Project
International Collaborative
81 Kirkland Street, Unit 2, Cambridge, MA 02138
https://www.facebook.com/maasa…
http://internationalcollaborat…
Water biomonitoring in Costa Rica:
ANAI, Inc.,
1120 Meadows Road, Franklin, North Carolina 28734
More about these programs below.
I met Bob Lange at a presentation by Paul Polak (http://www.paulpolak.com), a social business entrepreneur for the bottom billion customers, hosted by MIT’s D Lab, Design Lab (http://d-lab.mit.edu), in April 2008. Bob was then combining cleaner cookstoves with solar electricity in a village on an island near Zanzibar:
“About a mile from Unguja, the southern major island of Zanzibar, there is the Island of Tumbatu. There are two villages on Tumbatu. Neither has electricity and there are no roads or cars on the island… Jongowe, on the southern tip of Tumbatu, has 625 households and a population of several thousand people.”
Previously, he had worked in Africa on science education. Since then, I’ve seen him start the Maasai Stoves and Solar Project which has helped a number of people, households and villages build their own cleaner cookstoves and chimneys and install their own solar lights and power systems. Now he is building microgrids on a compound, boma, or village scale in Tanzania:
“our boma-scale microgrid is really loved by the local people…. the boma owner has to put clean stoves in all the houses of the boma, as we are not going to electrify a network of unhealthy homes. and he has to provide a room or building for the panels, the battery, charge controller, and shared appliances. we provide the rest.
“the boma people work together to bury all the wires etc.
“we use auto fuses for the individual households.
“check it out on face book. maasai stoves and solar.
“For a better life for the rural world, and a cleaner environment for all”
https://www.facebook.com/maasa…
http://internationalcollaborat…
International Collaborative, Maasai Stoves & Solar Project
81 Kirkland Street, Unit 2, Cambridge, MA 02138
Maasai Stoves and Solar has a fund raising goal of $60,000 for this program.
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Bill McLarney was one of the founders of the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod and I met him there back in the 1970s. Since 1978, he was been working with Asociación ANAI (http://www.anaicr.org) in the Talamanca region of Costa Rica, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and ‘Biodiversity Hotspot’. Over the years, ANAI and its Talamancan partners have built economically viable and environmentally sustainable projects which integrate conservation, development, and national technical development:
“…nature conservation, organic agro forestry, local processing and marketing, sustainable forest management, land titling for small farmers and community ecotourism. In all cases, our approach has included local participation and leadership, applied science, synthesis of local and external knowledge and experiences, creating linkages to integrate conservation and development, grassroots organizational development, and forming alliances.”
There is now a network of local and regional initiatives, facilities, grassroots organizations which are self-sustaining and new projects focused on strengthening the practical linkages between rural development, nature conservation, and biodiversity including a significant citizen science effort in biomonitoring:
“training residents of the indigenous territories bordering the La Amistad World Heritage Site in Costa Rica and Panama as aquatic parataxonomists – citizen scientists capable of analyzing and reporting on the health of their rivers and streams. This program – so far as we know the first aquatic parataxonomy program in the world – has been of critical importance both in solving water and habitat quality issues of local origin and staving off destructive megaprojects such as open pit mines and giant hydro dams which threaten not only aquatic systems but the cultural identity of the Cabecar, Bribri, Naso and Ngobe people.”
ANAI, Inc., 1120 Meadows Road, Franklin, North Carolina 28734
ANAI has a fund raising goal of $30,000 for their biomonitoring project.
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