This statement comes from Gilda Monjane, a Master’s student in sociology at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) in Mozambique. She has just finished a Master’s course in Rural Sociology and Management of Development and has been writing her thesis in collaboration with students from the Physics Department at UEM and The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (
“When the sunbeams hit the reflecting walls, the heat that is generated stays under the glass and the temperature can rise to about 100 degrees Celsius,” Dr. Cuamba explains. Here he is standing in the field were the UEM is constructing a new research laboratory.
NTNU) on the NUFU-project Small Scale Concentrating Solar Energy Systems. Gilda has been looking at the social aspects linked to solar energy: people’s behaviours, acceptance and impact o daily life.
One of the major technical challenges in the project is to solve the questions related to solar energy and the storage of heat in small scale-appliances developed for households, such as solar cookers (see photo). The next and essential step is to get people in the villages to adapt to the new technology and make use of appliances in their everyday life.
“The solar cookers are good, but the fact that they don’t store the heat is a problem. People don’t want to cook at midday when the sun is at its strongest. This is why the researchers now are trying to develop a hybrid system where we incorporate heat storage which makes it possible to cook at any time," explains Dr. Boaventura Chongo Cuamba, who has a PhD in physics and is the coordinator of the project at UEM.
Social acceptance and environmental sustainability
The issue of social acceptance of new technology had not been addressed explicitly in the project until 2010, when a new activity with support from Norglobal was initiated. This includes the work of Gilda Monjane as well as PhD candidates at NTNU and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. Although the project is focusing on technologies for rural areas, the assessment of the acceptance of the technologies is not limited to a rural context.
The background to the project was the fact that many countries in the sub-Saharan region face severe and interrelated problems connected to energy and the environment because of the excessive consumption of wood fuel biomass. The extensive harvesting of woodland is associated with natural disasters and enhances the pressure on the environment, which seriously affects the living standards of the population.
The African partner countries in this project – Mozambique, Uganda and Ethiopia – all have in common the fact that 80 percent of their populations use biomass for cooking. At the same time the three countries, like most developing countries, are situated in the so-called sunbelt between 40° north and 40° south. In this area solar energy potentially could replace the use of firewood, assuming that the right technology, such as solar cookers, is available.
“In the short term this project will help create a sustainable focus on environmental problems. The long-term impact would be to replace wood, fossil fuels and [polluting ways of producing] electricity with solar energy,” says The Norwegian coordinator from NTNU, Professor Ole Jørgen Nydal.
Gender as cross-cutting issue
Gilda Monjane’s focus has been on gender issues and means of empowerment of women.
“Gender is a cross-cutting issue in Mozambique, and the various sectors are all supposed to cover gender issues in their operational plans, or at least produce their plans with gender issues in mind,” Gilda continues, adding that the government recognises that women and men do not have equal access nor control over reso
Gilda Monjane (right) together with women from the village. “The heat collector consists of three simple materials: a cardboard box, aluminium foil and a sheet of glass on top. The choice of materials is not without purpose as they are cheap and thereby affordable to the people in the communities. Here we are checking how hot the water was inside,” explains Gilda. Photo: G. Monjane
urces in Mozambique.
Her question was: what is the attitude amongst villagers towards new technology?
In order to gain a deeper understanding of whether new technologies could be an adequate means of empowerment, Gilda chose to do her field research in the rural areas of Mozambique in off-grid areas where the workload is heavy, especially on the women. Hence, the introduction of rather simple technology could have a major impact here.
As a theoretical backdrop, Gilda applied the theory of the Indian economist Amartya Sen and his Development as a Freedom from 1999. One of his main ideas is that technology is the means that enables development, and that development is the basis for freedom. Development requires the removal of all barriers that prevent people from enjoying freedom.
“Energy may contribute to development, as it is likely to reduce extreme poverty by expanding the number of factories, employees, social institutions and infrastructure in a given place and consequently reduce disease, maternal and infant mortality and poverty. Furthermore, energy offers an opportunity for individuals to take classes during evening hours and reduce illiteracy. There can be no meaningful, successful or durable empowerment without economic empowerment, and there is no freedom if there is no empowerment,” concludes Gilda.
To test the level of acceptance of new technology, Gilda asked the communities what they thought of using a solar box cooker in their houses. People in these regions normally live a very hard life; as well as spending several hours a day fetching firewood and water, they perform other domestic tasks such as preparing maize for the family porridge, doing agricultural work, cleaning and taking care of the family. When Gilda introduced the solar box to a group of women, it was the first time they had ever seen such a device in the village. The women were largely positive but quickly identified its inability to operate after sunset, which is when they normally prefer to prepare hot meals.
Multiple layers of impact
Another aspect of Gilda’s concern was access to education and the impact of electricity on the learning environment. Gilda compared people in a class of 25 students of alphabetisation, of which only seven had electricity in their homes. The comparison showed, maybe not surprisingly, that the best students in the class were the seven who had electricity. She also found that they even had time to teach other people in the community, help their children to do homework, and learn other activities such as using sewing machines.
Next, Gilda looked into the health impact of electricity in the community. People who once were used to walking long distances to get water from a manually driven pump, now have access to a water pump driven by solar energy. Gilda explains that even though some people live far away from the pumping system, their lives have improved. The water is clean, and the spread of disease has been significantly reduced because water from the solar energy pump is not only easier to pump up, it is treated as well.
Clean water is one necessity, another is modern means of communication: The one thing that almost everyone has, even in rural areas of Africa, is a mobile phone. Even for this purpose solar energy appears to be very useful; in one village Gilda found a house equipped with a solar panel where people could come to charge their phone.
“Mobile phones are a kind of empowerment as well. Most of the men in this specific community work in South Africa since it is very close to the border. Being able to call their husbands is a kind of freedom for the women,” Gilda points out.
Migrant workers coming to the towns looking for a better life pose a familiar challenge to many developing countries, Mozambique being no exception. Urban poverty is a problem in Mozambique, and according to Gilda, providing electricity to rural areas could be one way of reducing the urban poverty because people will stop moving to the towns.
“I consider urban poverty as a form of rural poverty that has migrated to the city. It is a kind of consequence of a rural exodus. Villagers leave the rural areas with a lot of expectations of the big town, but most of the time they don’t have relatives or anyone they know in the city. Once they arrive they end up in the slum with others in the same situation, fighting for survival in areas that were initially not designed for building houses. Areas that are easily flooded, that are abundant with malaria, TB, cholera and other potential diseases,” Gilda concludes.
Her thesis and findings will be an important contribution to the project, as they look deeper into the social aspects of modern technology; a necessity in the creation of sustainable future-orientated solutions for developing countries.
Specialisation through collaboration
To collaborate across borders is a major objective in NUFU-supported projects. When we ask Dr. Cuamba about the technical focus in Mozambique compared to Ethiopia and Uganda, he is not holding back on the advantages of the cooperation bet
“The sunbeams are reflected from the small mirrors to the receiver, which contains absorbing material. The absorbing material transforms the sunbeams into heat. Now we are testing how much energy we can gain from this construction,” explains PhD candidate Amos Veremachi.
ween the countries.
In Ethiopia, apart from constructing the whole solar energy system, they experiment with ways of cooking the traditional bread injera by the use of solar ovens. Injera is a very important source of nutrition, not only in Ethiopia, but in Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen as well.
In Uganda they are developing heat storage and looking for opportunities to use heat energy for other appliances.
All the devices in the small-scale solar energy system can be tested in the laboratories at NTNU, which frequently plays host to researchers from its partner universities. During the spring of 2011 a PhD student from Maputo will be building three different absorbent components for the storage of solar energy for the new test environment that was recently set up in Maputo. To see if the components provide the right type of functionality, they must also be tested in the right conditions under the African sun.
“From the collaboration we gain specialisation. There is no way we can specialise in everything here in Mozambique. Next, we can transmit our experience to each other’s countries, such as the social aspects from Gilda’s work,” Dr. Cuamba concludes.