Let there be light: A hand-made solar lamp from Uganda

Charge me up!

John Timmer

Last week, I got notification that there was a package waiting for me at our corporate headquarters in Times Square. The customs declaration announced that it was a solar-powered lamp. That on its own didn't surprise me. A variety of organizations have been promoting these as indoor lighting for places that aren't on the grid, and I'd covered just how significant the health benefits of this lighting can be since it would displace fuels that create lots of indoor air pollution.

But opening the package brought a rather unexpected surprise. There was a solar lamp inside, but it wasn't the sort of thing that I'd expect from a large aid organization. It was clearly made by hand, with rough edges in its white plastic and the On/Off labels stuck on with adhesive. The letter that accompanied it told an interesting tale. Its manufacturer, Simon Lule, was making these himself in a workshop in Kampala, Uganda, selling them for the price of about two months' worth of kerosene, the fuel of choice in the area.

Simon was raising awareness of his work after launchinga fundraising campaign hoping to buy some equipment that could injection-mold the plastic. And he was hoping that an article on his work would raise the profile of his campaign.

Masa Energy's Simon Lule describes his creation.

We've been able to confirm Lule's description of the power and lighting situation in Kampala through someone in the US Military who's stationed there. And, through e-mail and a Skype call, he was able to provide a lot of detail regarding how the hardware came to be and is now produceddetails that are consistent with the unit we have and the video he's produced.

Lule told Ars that the whole thing started when he returned home to Uganda from London to visit his grandparents. Although Uganda does have a limited electric grid (it generates most of its power from dams on the Nile River), most of the population doesn't have access to it. The CIA World Factbook rates the country as 139th of 216 countries in terms of electricity consumption, barely edging out New Caledonia. The organization says that "unreliable power" is holding back Uganda's economic development. Lule said that only eight percent of the country's population has access to the electric grid, a figure consistent with other sources we've checked.

Lule's grandparents are among the remaining 92 percent and were lighting their house with kerosene. As we learned late last year, burning fuel indoors for lighting and cooking kills more people every year than malaria; Lule put the health impact at the equivalent of two packs a day of cigarettes. He also told us that the fuel costs over a dollar a weeknot a small figure, given that Uganda's average per-capita income is only $1,400.

So, his first thought was to buy a solar lamp, one that can charge during the day and provide lighting at night. But when he went searching for a product in Uganda, all the options were expensive and didn't run long enough to be useful. So, thinking he'd found a way to both do good and supplement his income, Lule looked into whether he could import them from China. But again, none of the options would actually work well due to either cost or performance.

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Let there be light: A hand-made solar lamp from Uganda