Climate

Bright lights in Bengali Nights

Renewable energy for all the millions of poor farmers without access to the grid, that is the objective of Grameen Shakti, a social business company, has succeeded in installing a quarter of a million small solar home systems. Rural women benefit most, and some of them also manufacture and install many of the system components, the project represents a path to a brighter future.

On the wide Bengali plains, the first rice crop of the season has just been harvested as cows graze among rice stubble and fresh green straw. Roads, villages and farms surrounded by groves of trees rise above the clay-walled network of rice paddies like islands in an emerald sea.

Water shimmers in the fields; the result of a monsoon season that arrived a month earlier than usual this year. The traffic is bustling on the main road. Swarms of carts and rickshaws weighed down by rice sacks peddle alongside honking buses that zigzag through traffic at a breakneck pace.

 This is Bangladesh, one of the world’s most densely populated countries with over one thousand inhabitants per square kilometer. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world, where each farmer has just a few hectares of farmland, and many have even less.

22,000 solar home system

At the local branch office of Grameen Shakti (literally “village energy,” in English) in Phulpur, there is much work to be done. Farmers have extra money to spend after the rice harvest, and orders for new solar home systems are piling in.

It is the first of June and the office’s six employees are busy compiling monthly sales reports for the main office in Dhaka. Since opening in the Mymensingh district, the local branch has installed some 22,000 solar home systems, 500 biogas facilities and 2,000 improved cooking stoves throughout the countryside.

Only forty percent of Bangladesh’s estimated 160 million inhabitants have access to the power grid. For everyone else, kerosene lamps and firewood are the main energy sources, except for those who have installed sustainable energy systems from Grameen Shakti. Introducing new energy solutions here is difficult, since almost fifty percent of the population lives below the poverty line, on less than one dollar a day.

The literacy rate is also low: Less than 40 percent of the population is able to read and write. Grameen Shakti’s solution to the current challenges is an innovative financial model based on payments divided into affordable installments.

Women as costumers

 The company, whose customer base is made up predominantly of women, offers 36-month payment plans with a fifteen percent down payment and a six percent “service charge”. On average, a home energy system costs about 290 Euros and includes five fluorescent light armatures, a 12-Volt outlet for a black-and-white TV set, a mobile phone charger and a 100 ampere-hour lead battery.

The payments, amounting to about 8 Euros per month, are collected each month by female technicians who also monitor and repair the systems. A fully charged battery will last for three consecutive days without sun, in a region where the sun shines a full 340 days a year.

An easier time for homework

At Shefalys farm the new solar power system draws curious stares. Neighbors and family have gathered to watch the three technicians from Grameen Shakti and Shefaly  beams with pride.

The family has saved for more than a year to afford the new solar home system, and Shefaly hopes that her two children will now have an easier time doing homework in the evenings. Of course, they will also be able to watch the television more often, without having to worry about expensive dry batteries.

Homework and TV

At another nearby farm, Hasna Hena is extremely pleased with her solar home system.

“Life has become easier,” she explains. “Our sons can do their homework in the evenings, and we can watch TV and load our mobile phone at home, instead of at the marketplace in town. We also save money. Before, we spent more than ten Euros a month on kerosene and batteries.”

The family has two years of installments left to pay. With three boys in school, lighting in the evening is crucial. They have plenty of homework, and education is important if they have any aspirations for the future.

I ask Mehedi Hassan, the oldest son, which he likes best, the TV set or the lighting? He says he most appreciates the lighting, as does his dad, but the look on his face says just the opposite. Hasna Hena’s family has also invested in a home biogas facility.

Fermentation chamber gives gas 

Although their poultry farm, with its five hundred egg-laying hens, is relatively small, it nonetheless produces huge quantities of droppings every day. The droppings are poured into a concrete cylinder, mixed with water and flushed down into an underground fermentation chamber made of clay bricks. The resulting gas runs from a pipe in the yard through a hose to the kitchen, where the one-burner gas stove stays lit for hours every day.

Hasna cooks for ten people, three meals a day. Meanwhile, at the other end of the biogas facility the fermented sludge is surfacing, driven by the building gas pressure. The sludge has almost no odor. No flies are to be seen, even when the sludge is shoveled over to the nearby compost, where it is left to rest for a year before being spread as manure in the fields.

 “Now we’re living almost as comfortably as in town – no smoke from the firewood stove, bright lighting in the evenings and the TV, too,” says Hasna, smiling and gesticulating with her mobile in hand.

Mobile phones in every family

­­Mobile phones and calls are cheap in Bangladesh, and serve as the channel for all kinds of business. The farmers get the latest market prices by text message, make their business agreements by mobile and arrange deliveries. For this reason, even very poor families often own a mobile phone. Grameen Phone is one of the largest mobile phone operators and, like Grameen Shakti, is a member of the Grameen group, whose founder is the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammed Yunus. The majority of the companies in the group, including Grameen Bank, are driven as non-profit social organizations.

One notable exception is Grameen Telecom, now part of a commercial joint venture with Vodafone. In total there are 22 separate Grameen companies, all headquartered in the Grameen Building, a twenty-story skyscraper in central Dhaka.

Smoke-free air

Baful owns a small restaurant along the main street in the village of Sinher Shor. There is access to the power grid here, but the demand for electricity so outweighs the amount generated that power outages are frequent. So Baful has installed a solar power system as a backup. In addition, he has installed three new clay cooking stoves, built according to Grameen Shakti’s design, in the restaurant’s open kitchen shed.

The main improvement is a simple, concrete chimney that diverts smoke and burns firewood with fifty percent greater efficiency. It is still baking hot in the kitchen, but the smoke-free air is a major improvement to the working environment, according to the head chef.

The stoves cost only 60 Euros each, including on-site construction, and conserve 80 kilos of firewood a day. At around two Euros of savings per day, Baful’s upfront investment was repaid within three months.

Solar-power, good for business

Nasul Islam runs a small pharmacy in the village. His solar-powered lighting, which allows him to keep his shop open until ten o’clock in the evening every weekday, has been good for business. Because his customers are farmers who work the fields in the daytime, he now brings in four or five times more income, with only two extra business hours per day.

The village’s first solar home system was installed in 1998. Since then, solar cell electricity has simply marketed itself among neighbors, the message travelling almost spontaneously from village to village. Now ten shops in Sinher Shor have solar-powered lighting and 300 solar home systems have been installed throughout the village.

Women suffers from smoke

We visit a shed with bamboo roofing and a collection of benches arranged in front of a corrugated iron box. This is the local public TV and video center, where the standard charge for watching a film is to buy three cups of Cha, the traditional Bengali tea, with a lot of milk and sugar, during each show.

In a neighboring village I meet with Dr. P. K. Roy, a retired doctor from a Canadian Christian mission station in the Chittagong hill tracts, near the border to Burma. He tells about the health risks posed by inhaling the smoke from traditional clay stoves without chimneys. In these houses, women often suffer from pulmonary disorders and has shorter lifespans due to smoke inhalation.

The doctor has had three of Grameen Shakti’s cooking stoves installed, as well as a home biogas facility, on the farm where he lives with his three sons and their families. His daughter-in-law Chandra is also excited by the fact that cooking has become so much easier. She no longer has to squat to prepare food, thanks to an elevated kitchen worktop, another recent luxury.

But not everyone is equally impressed, at least not her grandmother, who still stubbornly squats in the yard with her traditional clay stove, amidst a plume of smoke.

Components for solar systems 

Nanjin Ara Sultana is general manager of the Grameen Technology Center in Phulpur. A university-educated electronics engineer, she works in the center together with one other engineer and three technicians – all women – who manufacture and assemble the main components for the solar home systems. They make the control units, which connect the cables and control the battery charging, the fluorescent lamp armatures and the mobile chargers.

Electronic components and printed circuit boards are sent from the main office. The total output of this one tiny factory is about 200 control units and 3,000 lamp armatures per month.

The technicians were selected from a group of twenty women who had undergone a fifteen-day introductory course. The three with the best results were chosen. Several of the others now assemble components from home, receiving tools and supplies from the technology center.

 A new life with a job

Sipra Roy, one of the technicians, appreciates the work. She earns a piece wage amounting to anywhere between 100 and 120 Euros per month. Another employee, Ambia, tells us her story. Previously, she had been beaten by her husband before moving back home to her parents and applying for the introductory course. Not only did she qualify for a job at the technology center – she passed with the highest score. Now she walks six miles to and from work every day, but her income makes it possible to support herself and help out her parents. Her husband courted her several times and begged her to come back. Eventually she gave in.

The couple has found a new kind of balance in their relationship, and the two now live with Sipra’s parents. Her life has begun anew thanks to her job, and at home she is the proud owner of a solar home system of Grameen’s largest model, which generates up to 130 Watts.

Respect because of the job 

Saima has started her own business in a shed adjacent to her brother’s house, where she mounts and delivers circuit board components as subcontractor to the technology center. A neighbor had told her about the introductory course, so she applied. She also claims to earn more respect because of her new job.

Saima was married at the age of 16 and moved in with her husband’s parents. When her husband began to abuse her and demand more dowry, she left him and moved into her brother’s house. Now she is thinking about hiring a new employee, signing more subcontracts and eventually running her own electronic assembly factory on a larger scale.

Most employees are women

Grameen Shakti now has expanded its network across the country, with more than seven hundred local branch offices and five thousand employees, most of them women.

 Today, their efforts have reached 2.5 million people in more than 40,000 villages. In June 2009, thirteen years after the founding of the company, more than 250,000 solar home systems have been installed, and the numbers are surging at a rate of 10,000 installations every month. Not to mention more than 40,000 improved cooking stoves and 7,000 home biogas facilities. The ambition is to install one million solar home systems by 2011.

Solar lighting for all

There is a buzz in the mobile phone of Mr. Dipal Chandra Barua, managing director of Grameen Shakti, as we meet in his office on the nineteenth floor of the Grameen Building in Dhaka. It is a text message listing the company’s latest monthly sales figures. Dipal smiles enthusiastically when he sees the results:

Over 9,000 solar home systems have been ordered, exceeding their monthly sales targets.

“The basic idea of Grameen Shakti is to provide the rural poor with sustainable energy solutions. We’re well on our way, but there’s still a long way to go,” says Dipal.

“My dream is to provide renewable energy solutions for all of the 75 million who live without access to the power grid.” Due to the scale of its orders, Grameen Shakti is able to negotiate rock bottom prices for their solar cells, which are now shipped from Japan.

Same models, double price

In Europe, the same models run at double the price. Government loans and subsidies also help to keep the companies’ costs down. “We order somewhere in the range of six to eight containers of solar cells every month. The batteries come from local suppliers and the remaining equipment we manufacture ourselves,” explains Dipal.

Control units, armatures and mobile chargers are manufactured at 45 technology centers across the country. Most of the employees are women, and the centers provide training for additional women to become technicians and “barefoot” engineers.

“Men can do anything in our society. Women, who are often restricted to domestic work, are deprived of so many opportunities,” says Dipal as a motivation for the company’s focus on women.

"Social engineers"

“Another advantage with female technicians is that men can’t freely visit women in their homes. When they start working as technicians and improve their standard of living, women are able to earn more respect from those around them. More than just specialists, our technicians are ‘social engineers’ who maintain networks, collect payments and ensure the quality of technical systems.”

The company’s central asset is its tight network of widely distributed office branches. Now, this network is turning out to be more useful than ever. Two weeks before our visit, the cyclone Aila hit the coast of the Bengali bay. 300,000 people were instantly rendered homeless and 200 were killed – and this was before the water receded. Wells were inundated with salt water, causing an acute shortage of drinking water for the local population.

No international help

Weeks after the event most here still lived beneath sheets of plastic along the roadsides or in the concrete storm shelters built in advance by the government. The Grameen Shakti network is now used to distribute emergency aid to the devastated area from where Dipal has just returned, visibly affected.

 The government remains unwilling to declare the coastal regions a disaster area, leaving international aid organizations unable to help.

“I saw solar panels being washed away by the storm’s waves. But we’ll replace the installations that have been lost,” says Dipal.

“Aila wasn’t the strongest cyclone we’ve experienced. In fact, it was much weaker than Sidr, two years ago, but the flooding this time has been worse than ever. This is what climate changes means to us – stronger and more frequent cyclones, and more flooding.”

Replace diesel generators

Dipal has a number of visions for the future. Recently, Grameen Shakti has begun several new development projects ranging from establishing local tree nurseries and conducting experiments combining solar cell and wind power systems to accepting installment payments by mobile phone.

Dipal himself believes strongly in a new concept for “on-grid” urban solar power systems. These systems would replace diesel generators and other backup systems that currently provide urban populations with access to electricity during the daily power outages.

In Bangladesh, the demand for electricity far exceeds the current capacity for power generation. But “on-grid” solutions will demand new types of financial arrangements, since government loans don’t apply for on-grid systems. For years, Grameen Shakti has also tried to get solar cell systems and improved stoves approved for CDM credits (the UN system for global carbon credits).

So far, their efforts have yet to be rewarded. “The CDM system is immensely bureaucratic,” Dipal explains, “and receiving approval for many small installations appears to be much more difficult than for a single large facility.”

A cyclof debt

Of course, Grameen Shakti has its critics. Kushi Kabir, head of the Bangladeshi NGO Nijera Kori, names a few of the apparent problems.

“Solar electricity is a good thing, of course, but so far it doesn’t help those in extreme poverty. It also draws farmers into a cycle of debt, where they have to take new loans from other sources to repay their debts to Grameen.

Microcredits have become very popular in Bangladesh, and the traditional money lenders are still around. People take loans for tin roofs, solar electricity and wells, among other things. If a flood or cyclone strikes, they might lose everything, but their debts remain."

The borrowers  keep their savings with Grameen Bank, which can withdraw funds from savings accounts if installments are not paid on schedule.

 “The microcredit institutions often boast about their high levels of repayment. But since the payments are due within the first week or month, the borrowers often have to take another loan, sometimes at extortionate rates of interest, to repay the initial loan.

Extreme group pressure

In Grameen’s banking system, loans are also offered to groups in which a number of different borrowers are held accountable. If one borrower is unable to pay, the others are required to cover the missing installments. This leads to extreme group pressure to repay at any cost.”

Dipal refutes these claims, explaining that “Grameen Shakti does not target Grameen Bank borrowers. It is a separate organization. During disasters, loans are rescheduled and Grameen Shakti‘s installments are paid on a monthly, not weekly basis. The company has no savings component and there is no group lending. Besides, each installment is equivalent to a month of kerosene expenses, so there is no additional financial burden.”

On the precipice of a changing climate

Nearly all of Bangladesh lies within a great river delta made up of more than 1,300 distributary channels. This is where two of the world’s largest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, meet. Most of the country is dependent on conditions higher up in the Himalayas, where glaciers are now melting fast. Rainfall and water runoff are increasing, which will cause more frequent flooding. In the near future, when the glaciers are gone, flows will instead diminish and Bangladesh will be left with only a trickle of river water during the dry season.

A shortage of fresh water

To make a dire situation worse, a large number of hydroelectric dams in India, China, Nepal and Bhutan will siphon off much of Bangladesh’s remaining water supply. Add to these factors a predicted rise in sea levels of perhaps more than one meter over the coming century, and what remains is a country facing a severe shortage of fresh water, with entire regions permanently submerged below sea level.

Bangladesh has adopted a National Adaptation Program of Action (NAPA) for climate change, which will draw its funding from several development aid authorities. Sweden has allocated 14 million Euros for the program over a three-year period, and it is expected that all major donor countries will soon follow suit by raising additional funding for climate adaptations. What no one seems to know, however, is exactly which kinds of projects will have the greatest impact.

The article is a translation from one published in the magasine Sveriges Natur, written by Anders Friström. Translation from swedish by Grant Baldrigde.