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Livelihood / Living

@GroblerduPreez
Across Africa, renewable energy is powering more homes than ever, but it hasn’t yet powered prosperity. For smallholder farmers, productive-use technologies such as solar irrigation, cold storage and agro-processing can have a transformative impact.
In a small farming community near Aframso in Ejura, nightfall used to bring fear and deep darkness. The community, located in a suburb of Aframso in the Ejura Sekyedumase Municipality of the Ashanti Region, has no formal name. But for the people who live there, the challenges of living in darkness were real.
A Journalist for The Energy Pioneer toured Turkana and Kagera, the two poorest rural districts in Kenya and Tanzania, respectively – places where just 20% of homes and facilities are connected to the national hydroelectricity/coal power grids.
A recent analysis and accompanying dashboard by IFPRI provides quantitative estimates of the GHG emissions from deploying either diesel-powered or solar-powered irrigation systems—showing that a transition to solar is both economically feasible and would yield dramatic emissions reductions in many countries.
The poorest Africans are paying the highest unit price for the smallest amopunt of electricity. To reach the truly unelectrified, governments and development partners must shift from a commercialisation-first approach to a public-good-first framework.
In Kenya alone, more than 70 percent of smallholder farmers still lack access to cold storage, according to the World Bank, leaving them vulnerable to spoilage and volatile markets. Solar drying, in particular, has emerged as one of the most widely adopted innovations for vegetables.
Given the ongoing demonstration of the technical feasibility of agrivoltaics in several parts of the world, it is expected that this technology can be applied at a large scale, particularly in the most vulnerable parts of Africa, in a way that provides enhanced energy access and economic viability without sacrificing the soil.
A Kenyan solar-powered invention is taking the world by storm as it transforms vaccine delivery in the most remote of communities. The VacciBox, created by social enterprise Drop Access, has just been unveiled as a finalist in one of the world’s most prestigious awards for innovation and sustainability, the 2026 Zayed Sustainability Prize.
In 2021, Chiedza founded ZimbosAbantu to improve healthcare access in remote communities. By repurposing vans into solar-powered, tech-enabled mobile clinics, the startup brings healthcare directly to those who need it most. Chiedza says her team has cut walking distances from an average of 15 kilometers to just three.

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