Lighting a nation, one village at a time!

At our January 5th meeting at the Movenpick Hotel, our guest speaker was Naeem Mawji, a young but very accomplished individual that has initiated change in the lighting in Tanzania. For years, village have waited desperately for electricity to reach Masurura, in northeastern Tanzania. According to his vision he saw electricity as a catalyst to transform Tanzania's economy. With 80 per cent of the country's workforce employed in agriculture, he knew that spreading electricity to rural areas would make a significant difference in the lives of the workers. Masurura is a case in point. Access to electricity would also allow businesses in Masurura to stay open longer, connect people to the Internet, and facilitate entrepreneurship. In August 2009, Mawji travelled to Masurura to install solar panels in three key areas: the community centre, the medical dispensary, and a classroom at Masurura Elementary School. All three locations in Masurura where the solar panels are installed are outfitted to charge mobile phones. Before electricity, most villagers relied on women to travel 20 kilometres to a nearby town, charge a car battery, and bring it back to Masurura to use as cell phone charger. Today, fees collected from the cell phone charging stations are reinvested to maintain the systems. Seeing the improvement in village life prompted Mawji to found a social enterprise called Carbon X Energy. Recently, the company won $100 000 in seed money from World Bank's Lighting Rural Tanzania Competition. The grant is currently being used in a pilot project to connect 50 homes in Masurura to a solar-powered mini-grid. Carbon X his company has taken its projects to six more villages in the region and hope to continue their work in effort to transform the economy of the core of the country. We all were very inspired by Naeem and his passion to make a difference. All in all we had an excellent lunch meeting.