KIBUYE, Rwanda — The life of a refugee, no matter where, is vulnerable. It might be surprising, but something as simple as light can reduce many of the problems refugees today face. One example of this is gender-based violence, which is a growing problem in refugee camps. For women, having light can serve as a form of protection. Global BrightLight Foundation collaborated with Africa’s Great Lakes Energy and Greenlight Planet to provide solar lanterns for the refugees of the Kiziba camp in Rwanda. In an interview with co-founder of Global BrightLight, Joe Hale, he explained how the distribution led to ensuring much needed light after dark while improving lives in significant ways.
Global BrightLight Foundation (GBF) provides globally accessible and affordable energy solutions to improve the education, community environment, economic opportunities and quality of life of those living in countries and villages that currently lack access to electricity and power. GBF has current projects in Rwanda, Nepal, Uganda, Haiti and Guatemala. At the end of 2013, GBF reached over 50,000 families.
Rwanda has been hosting refugees from the volatile Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As of 2014, almost 78,000 refugees resided in the country, located in five camps. With an average monthly arrival rate of 2,600 individuals, the number of refugees for 2014 may rise to almost 91,000 persons.
The Kiziba refugee camp is adjacent to Lake Kivu in western Rwanda and is the nearest of the five camps to the DRC. It housed between 17,000-20,000 refugees at its height, most of them are Congolese. Although the camp is the size of a small town, it had no electricity. The refugees lived in small mud-huts with no windows, so darkness was the norm.
In a visit in 2012, Hale describes the scene he encountered at the Kiziba camp:
“There were 3,750 families who lived there. All lived in mud houses, many they built themselves. The mud walls needed to be refreshed each year as they began to disintegrate during the rainy season. Each house had a plastic sheet for a roof provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Nothing was green. Everything was covered in a reddish sheen of dust. The 3,750 families were tightly situated on a hillside. There was no room to expand. The filth was astonishing.”
Establishing control and safety for the Kiziba refugees in their makeshift settlement is a priority. The UNHCR, the UN’s agency to protect refugees, identifies that gender-based violence is a growing problem in the Kiziba camp. Women are being assaulted on their way to use latrines at night. Hale only saw 12 latrines available for the entire camp, located a considerable distance away for most. Many sexual perpetrators use the cover of darkness to get away with their violating acts.
Hale explains that having no electricity and hence no light in the camps after dark did not help the gender-based violence problem. Routinely, women and girls were raped at night when they walked to the toilet. They did not scream out when they were attacked because they would be shamed and ostracized by the others in the camp knowing they had been raped.
At the same time, local forests were being stripped away for the use of biofuels and firewood in order to provide light after dark, which along the equatorial belt occurs shortly after 6 p.m. The growing population at the Kiziba camp was providing no alleviation to the problem of environmental degradation.
Furthermore, Hale saw that households were selling their limited UN-sourced food rations to buy expensive kerosene, candles, occasional vegetables or items of clothing. In essence, according to Hale, the real “currency” in the camp economy was food. The UN-rationed maize, beans, cooking oil and salt. However, food rations only met the bare minimum, so malnutrition threatened the family for the sake of expensive kerosene for light after dark. To add to the dire situation, the smoky emissions of the kerosene and candles could develop pulmonary disease.
Hale was informed that in desperation, some girls and women resorted to the sex trade to earn 500 to 2,000 Rwandan Francs or $1-4 (U.S.) when rations ran out before the end of the month. This, of course, did not help the gender-based violence issue that was growing in the camp. The multi-faceted problem of gender-based violence, environmental degradation and looming malnutrition and respiratory carcinogens fortunately brought about a collaborative solution.
Through Hale’s leadership, he mobilized his foundation, Global BrightLight, to team up with Sam Dargen, the founder of Great Lakes Energy, another organization like GBF working to promote the use of cleaner solar energy in Rwanda. Great Lakes was the supplier of the quality Sun King solar lanterns manufactured by Greenlight Planet. Together, Hale and Dargen worked with the UNHCR to distribute the solar lanterns to over 3,700 households in the Kiziba camp.
Greenlight Planet is a for-profit energy company with a socially-driven mission to provide affordable and high-quality solar lighting products to those suffering from energy poverty. Three million of its Sun King solar lanterns have been sold since 2009. The company aims to replace dirty fuel sources with clean tech energy in 20 million homes in the poorest parts of the world by 2016.
Rather than giving the solar lanterns away as freebies, Hale organized a program at Kiziba whereby residents planted trees around the camp as a reforestation project. In exchange for this work, residents received a lamp. This “sweat equity” project ensured that each family had “skin in the game” so they valued their solar lanterns.
Refugee leaders were trained on how to educate the beneficiaries about the use and care of the lanterns. In turn, they taught the community how to charge it effectively under the sun, and for those who had mobile phones, they learned how to charge their phones with the solar panels, which were packaged with the lanterns. Normally, mobile phone users had to find a vendor to pay for phone battery charging, so savings from that and from not purchasing kerosene and candles were an added benefit to the household.
According to Hale, the end results of the three-month program led to 20,000 trees planted in the surrounding areas. Test scores began to trend up with the correlation of more study time the solar lanterns offered into the night. According to the camp clinic, the number of respiratory illnesses and eye inflammation decreased impressively. And overall, as Hale puts it, “the air is just a little cleaner for all of us.”
More importantly, Hale notes, rapes and sexual assaults on women and girls went down. In conjunction with the American Refugee Committee’s work in the camp to combat gender-based violence, the solar lanterns have effectively deterred perpetrators from violating women in the cover of darkness. The fear of being identified with the lights have kept them at bay.
Given the successes of the Kiziba camp, the Global Brightlight Foundation aims to replicate the solar lantern distribution project to the other refugee camps in Rwanda. Hale sees a greater need of the solar lanterns for 12,000 more families living in Rwanda UNHCR camps.
GlobalBrightLight.org accepts monetary donations for its cause. A donation as little as $50 would help Global BrightLight provide a solar lantern for a needy household.
– Maria Caluag
Sources: Greenlight Planet, UNHCR, Global Brightlight Foundation, Great Lakes Energy, ARC, Global Sustainable Electricity Partnership
Photo: Global BrightLight Foundation