Around California, I’ve been seeing more and more solar panels. Solar panels installed subtly on people’s homes. Solar panels on wireless keyboards. Solar panels atop lights. In such a sunny state, these solar panels make perfect sense.
On my return to northern Uganda, I started looking more carefully at the different ways people use new technologies, such as mobile phones and computers. But with an emergent civic infrastructure, access to the electric grid in the region remains limited. So while I was focused on how people used technology, I had to wonder: how do they charge their devices at all?
I soon learned that enterprising citizens in rural northern Uganda often purchase solar panels. They then offer phone charging services at a range of what I observed to be around 400–500 shillings per charge. That’s about 20 US cents. The panels themselves, often coming from India and China, can cost as much as 200 US dollars, so it obviously takes a while to pay back that investment. But as one person told me, there is always someone who needs to charge his or her phone. Any freelancer can appreciate the value of a steady gig.
What seemed new to me was a practice already many years old. As I poked around the web to understand the mechanics of solar panels, I came across a 2010 New York Times article talks about solar panels in Kenya:
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.
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