But in 2017, Ngwira recognized another beacon worth evangelizing about: solar power.

“In the past, I have worked in very rural areas with no hope of getting the electricity network there,” says Ngwira. “Instead people would burn candles and that led to house fires. I would hear stories of children, and even elders, dying [in them].”

Safe, free to run, and without the need for expensive energy infrastructure, solar has helped to power off-the-grid communities across the world.

A group of people repairing solar devices.
More than 90 percent of the broken solar-powered devices in sub-Saharan Africa can be repaired, SolarAid estimates. Credit: Jason Mulikita / SolarAid

 

And in recent years solar has been a game changer across Africa. Since 2014, for example, Africa’s solar capacity has nearly increased tenfold, from 1.67 gigawatts to 13.48 gigawatts in 2023 — enough to power 100 million lightbulbs. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, Africa has 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources, and it is already the cheapest source in many parts of the continent.

However, as that growing amount of solar equipment has begun to age, it has also begun to break down.

In fact, according to a report in 2023 by the nonprofit SolarAid, of the 375 million solar energy kits that have been sold and distributed to off-grid populations around the world since the early 2000s, more than 250 million have fallen into disrepair.

It estimated that 75 percent of all solar products in sub-Saharan Africa — 110 million lights — no longer work.

Renewable energy experts warn that the solar industry has until now failed to create a sufficiently circular economy for solar devices to be repaired and refurbished, even as the size of the global solar market grows at astonishing rates of over 20 percent.

“Advances in the solar space have been nothing short of amazing,” says Tobias Hanrath, a professor of engineering and the Croll Chair for Energy Transitions at Cornell University. “But it’s short-sighted to think all we have to do is install a bunch of panels and it stops there. We have to look at these products over their lifetime.”

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Hanrath cites the example of plastic, which has been mass produced since the 1950s with very little thought as to how the waste would be processed, creating the plastic waste crisis that we have today.

But SolarAid is not only shining a light on the problem; it’s already working on fixing it. More than 90 percent of these broken solar-powered devices in sub-Saharan Africa can be repaired, the nonprofit estimates, and it has been training people in Zambia and Malawi, including Father Ngwira, to diagnose and repair devices.

In his first few years working with SolarAid, Father Ngwira distributed solar lights to hard-to-reach communities in Zambia, selling more than a thousand, he estimates, in his so-called role as a “solar entrepreneur.”