The Quest for Clean Drinking Water

Senegal... Where the Only Thing You Can Count on Is Power Outages.

       According to information provided by the Organization for One World of Solidarity (OEW), only 26% of the population located south of the Sahara Desert has direct access to electricity – making the region one of the least electrified in the world. And furthermore, the number of Africans who still have to live without access to electrical energy is on the rise.

      This situation will not change without outside help. The reason is obvious: expanding the overland network is not a lucrative endeavour for energy providers. There are long distances to cover before all the villages ‘in the bush’ can be reached and, as far as the distribution companies are concerned, the installation costs for electricity networks would be far greater than whatever the rural households would be able to pay.

       A large number of relief projects, which are supported by the World Bank among other organizations, are already devoting their efforts towards solving this problem, but Africa is still dependent on the funding provided by private investors.

        Senegal’s economy is currently growing more rapidly than many of its neighbouring countries in West Africa, a fact that is also reflected in its energy consumption. Only one in every three of the approximately 12 million inhabitants in Senegal is supplied with electricity via the public power network today. In rural areas, less than 20% of the population has access to electrical energy.

        Without electricity, it is not possible to create added value in the local environment, which is in turn the basic prerequisite for any type of sustainable development. After all, energy supply plays a key role, not only in the economy, but also in virtually every area of day-to-day life – regardless of whether in private households, schools, the skilled trades or hospitals.

        In Senegal, the high levels of insolation afford the ideal prerequisite for the installation of photovoltaic systems to provide direct access to electricity or maintain a reliable energy supply as decentralized stand-alone solutions.