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Global Challenges

Solar Power Helps Nigerian Villages; MIT Teacher Uses Engineering to Help People Around The World; Resourceful Non-Profit in India Uses Trash to Help Poor And Make Money

Aired November 25, 2006 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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JEFF KOINANGE, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR (voice-over): At first glance this looks like scene straight out of the Bible, a place that seems permanently stuck in a bygone era, a place where time seems to have stood still. But this is Africa, rural Nigeria to be exact, a land where people walk for miles on end just to fetch drinking water, a land where everything is done manually because that is the way it's been for centuries.

(on camera): When it comes to the concept of isolation, it doesn't get more remote than the village of Ahoto (ph), deep in Nigeria's northern corridor, where for decades, even centuries, the people here lived a meager existence under modern thatched roof homes with no running water, no electricity. But thanks to the help of an American NGO, and using one of the Earth's most powerful sources of energy, the villagers of Ahoto have taken a giant leap into the 21st century.

(voice-over): The NGO is called the Solar Electric Life Fund, or SELF, and it is giving rural Nigerians something to smile about these days, solar power.

BOB FEELING, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SELF: A country like Nigeria, with 120 million people, 80 percent of which have no electricity, the vast majority of these communities are not likely to be connected to the grid any time in the foreseeable future.

KOINANGE: They don't need the grid here in Ahoto. SELF has trained locals to install the highly durable solar powered units that are helping put previously unknown villages like this one squarely on the world map.

JEFF LANE, PROJECT MANAGER, SELF: This is where all the circuit breakers are, as well as metering, lightning protection. So this is basically our mains power. You can plug anything into this sight that you could plug into NEPA, basically.

KOINANGE: NEPA is the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority. Locals here humorously dub it Never Expect Power Always, a reference to the frequent power shortages plaguing most cities in Africa's most populous nation and making it unavailable in rural villages.

But here in Nigeria's arid north the power supply is dependable thanks to solar energy.

This scene would have been inconceivable in the past, the commissioning ceremony for the solar project held at night for maximum effect. A tour of the village shows just what effect solar energy is having on the locals. This is a community recreation center, complete with television, and even a computer room where just a year ago people would be burning the midnight oil, literally reading and writing.

IBRAHEM TURAKI, GOVERNOR, JIGAWA STATE: It's helped their life actually and economically. You can not quantify it because somebody living in 6th century, you're taking them to 23rd century (sic). So the gap in their life is huge.

KOINANGE: Well, maybe not the 23rd century, but close. The bottom line, according to experts, the advantages to using this alternative source of energy are immediately noticeable, lifestyle improvement for subsistence farmers like Abdu Abdallahi (ph). He used to work the fields for most of his days and would supplement his income by cutting hair with a manual clipper before the sun went down.

Nowadays, thanks to this project, he's making more money than he imagined, his electric clippers buzzing away late into the night.

It's great, he says. Before electricity the most I would cut is six or seven, but now I can cut three to four times that. And the same holds true for mother of five Han Satuali (ph). She used to spend most of her days fetching water miles away before coming home to do her choirs. But now the village well is just a few meters away, and fresh drinking water is pumped to the surface with power generated by these solar panels.

But critics worry the start up costs are high. Equipment to light up a village like Ahoto costs roughly 50,000 U.S. dollars up front. And the monthly electric bill can vary anywhere from three to five U.S. dollars. That's about what people here used to spend each month on kerosene candles and batteries, small change in most developed countries, but costly on a continent where 60 percent of the population live on less than a dollar a day.

In fact, less than half the people in this village of 5,000 can afford solar electricity, but the project initiator insists a fee is necessary.

FEELING: People don't value it once you give it away. That's been proven time and time again, but in our projects around the world, we've never wanted to give away these systems. We just don't think that's sustainable. On the other hand, asking families to pay cash for a solar system is prohibitively expensive. So we have used micro credit and other forms of innovative financing mechanisms, which allow families to pay for these systems over time.

KOINANGE: And when it comes to bridging the digital divide, Feeling insists solar energy has a definite role to play in rural Nigeria and the world at large.

From the dark ages to a lighted community it seems these villagers' prayers have been answered and they've made the first bold steps towards rural electrification and much improved lifestyles.

Jeff Koinange, CNN, Jigawa State in Northern Nigeria.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When you're actually living in the middle of these problems, there's a very different way of thinking about how you deal with them and understanding that just because you have read a lot of books about something doesn't mean that you actually understand what it's like to live in the middle of something.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And in the end what we obtain is the following, (INAUDIBLE) of charcoal.

ALEX QUADE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Meet engineer Amy Smith.

AMY SMITH, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: So, I at one point did some calculations and I think it's something like 40 billion hours a year are spent grinding grain. It might be more than that. And that is an awful lot of time that could be done doing other things.

QUADE: You might wonder what the bike has to do with this.

SMITH: You just feed the corn in through here.

QUADE: It's a pedal mill for grinding grain.

(on camera): This does actually save time, as opposed to grinding it by hand, right?

SMITH: Sure. By hand you would use one of these, sort of a mortar and pestle.

QUADE (voice-over): For people in developing countries the significance of the innovation is huge. What would have taken hours out of their day can be done in mere minutes.

SMITH: So why don't we just go around the room, and everyone -- yes Jules, you're going to be first, so start thinking now.

QUADE: Amy Smith is an instructor at MIT, who teaches her students to apply the science of engineering to real life problems.

SMITH: If there are things in the world that you can change and you feel it's important to change them, you should try to do so. And that's one of the things that I try to bring across to my students, is that, you know, they go out, they learn about problems, and they create solutions to them, and then they go back and they follow up and they try to implement those solutions. And I think that that's really important, because I think too often in this world people say, oh, someone should do something about that, instead of, I should do something about that. And so that's what I'm trying to create is a generation of doers, not spectators.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: After we left Delhi we went to Ranikhet, which is up in the hill country.

QUADE: Smith gets her students thinking about change by taking them to villages in India, China, South America, Africa.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We spent most of our time in a rural village that had no connection, whatsoever, to the outside world.

QUADE: They live as the villagers live, experience first hand the daily struggles.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When you're actually living in the middle of these problems there's a very different way of thinking about how you deal with them, and understanding that just because you've read a lot of books about something doesn't mean that you actually understand what it's like to live in the middle of something.

QUADE: Then Smith and her students try to come up with low cost, life enhancing solutions.

SMITH: There's, you know, half the world living on less than two dollars a day, billions of people without access to clean drinking water or sanitation, and so the need is out there and I feel like here at MIT we have some resources that we can apply to try to help solve some of the problems.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We put in the (INAUDIBLE) and with our hammer we just have to compress it and in the end what we obtain is the following, which is a brickette of charcoal.

QUADE: Using their engineering skills they design and develop accessible technologies.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We also had an opportunity to make charcoal from corn.

QUADE: They have shown people in several countries how to turn agricultural waste into charcoal fuel.

SMITH: They love it. One of the things which is great is, you know, they will always come up to me and say things like, before I used to only look at this and I would see trash, but now I see charcoal, you know, and so it's exciting because I think in any case where you can take something which is basically a waste product and turn it into an income generating project, or something, it's great.

Charcoal is one of the biggest expenditures. Cooking fuel is -- it's about a quarter of a family's income over the course of a year. And so if you can allow them to either make their own charcoal, or to make extra and sell it in the market place, you're doing a good thing for their family income as well.

So this is the peanut sheller.

QUADE: They have also introduced people to this device.

SMITH: You just put the peanuts in.

QUADE: Peanuts are a cheap source of protein.

SMITH: And then you just turn the crank, and down below the peanuts and the shells should be coming out. It's very much a time saving device. A bag of peanuts ordinarily takes one to two days to shell, and this way you could do it in 15 minutes or so.

QUADE: Which means children who do this could spend more time in school instead.

(on camera): What has been the response to this machine?

SMITH: Oh, people really liked it. They like it a lot. Yes, the peanut sheller was a big hit. In Ghana we called it the Devi Polava (ph) machine, which means no problem, because it's so easy.

QUADE (voice-over): Not all the problems are easy to fix, but Smith shows her students they can make a difference.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We were there just for a few days to try and help them out and they just kept thanking us just for actually having an interest in helping their community. It actually made me feel bad that I wasn't able to stay there for so much longer and have such a greater impact, that we had to leave so early.

SMITH: I think it's a good thing to motivate students and I think it's a good thing to get them moving in that direction, but I think it's a dangerous thing to let them think that by having this experience that's their contribution and they're done. I think it's the beginning of a step, but it's a long rode.

QUADE: Amy Smith, teacher, engineer, world citizen.

Alex Quade, CNN GLOBAL CHALLENGES, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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SHALLABH AHUJA, FOUNDER, CONSERVE: For me it's a humbling experience that I don't know why it's fallen on me to do that, but I'm so glad that I have been able to contribute towards improving the lot of a little bit of people.

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SATINDER BINDRA, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A cold star to rag picker Shankar's work day. He huddles for warmth by this fire. Then, after a simple breakfast of hot milk and toast, he sets off in his rickety cart to keep his first appointment of the morning.

Just a short distance away Rekha Dhevi is already at work, busy collecting hundreds of such discarded and soiled plastic bags. It's back- breaking work, but there's no shortage of these bits of plastic.

With an economy growing at almost eight percent a year, India now consumes five million tons of plastic a year and will soon become the world's third largest consumer, after the U.S. and China. But with growth comes increasing pollution.

Rag pickers have traditionally helped recycle a lot of this material, but now a private non-profit organization, called Conserve, has come up with a new idea. It's hiring hundreds or rag pickers like Rekha to manufacture more upscale and avant guard products like hand bags, sandals and belts form discarded plastic.

In the process Rekha now earns about three times as much as she did before, about 70 dollars a month.

This money helps me to feed my children, she says. I have a house for which I have to pay a rent of 30 dollars a month and this money helps me do that.

As the sun comes up Rekha's load gets heavier and she rushes to keep her appointment with her friend, and fellow rag picker, Shankar. They quickly load her bag onto her cart and the two friends set off.

A few minutes later they arrive at the center set up by Conserve. Here another coworker ways their morning's collection to determine how much they will be paid. Shankar says he's had another good day at the office.

This is good work, he says, and hopefully I can continue to work here. I certainly think I can benefit from it. In the future I'm going to have a family and I have to provide for them. I think this will be good for all of us in the future.

For the time being though, everybody is focusing on the present. These workers carefully sift through Rekha and Shankar's load of plastic. Then the bags are cut by another group of workers, some of them so poor that before this job they had never used a pair of scissors and had to be specially trained to do so.

Once the bags are cut, they are vigorously hand washed in detergent. After they are aired and dried out, they are once again sorted and stacked into these colorful heaps.

(on camera): The plastic is then compressed and heated, and since this technology is still in the process of being patented, we couldn't film it. But take a look at this. The rebirth of hundreds of thousands of grimy and soiled plastic bags into eye-catching sheets.

(voice-over): These sheets are then stitched into bags, belts, bracelets and shoes by trained craftsmen. Watching in supervising the entire operation are Anita and Shallabh Ahuja, the founders of Conserve. From just a few workers when they first started out two and a half years ago, the Ahujas now hire 300 people. They promote from within the organization and plow everything they earn back into the business.

AHUJA: For me it's a humbling experience that I don't know why it's fallen on me to do that, but I'm so glad that I have been able to contribute towards improving the lot of a little bit of people.

BINDRA: Shallabh Ahuja is an engineer. He's responsible for the technical end of operations. His wife Anita is an artist, the one who has designed all these hand bags. The Ahujas now annually export such bags, worth 150,000 thousand dollars, across the world, a far cry from their earlier days, when Anita says it was hard to get people interested in her work.

ANITA AHUJA, FOUNDER, CONSERVE: So I was very scared. There was so many people who were working along with me, believing in my dream, my idea, and I was not sure where I was going to lead them.

BINDRA: Some of Anita's bags are now being sold in London's boutique stores. Each colorful bag here can set back customers almost 40 Euros, or 50 dollars, but they are buying them as fast as conserve can ship them out.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think they're fantastic. They're so unique. I've never seen any other bags made from recycled plastic bags. I mean, you wouldn't believe it if you saw them and you touched them.

BINDRA: Rekha Devi also finds it hard to believe a process that started out in the slums of New Delhi could have ended up in London. She also had no clue that some of the bags she and others here helped make sell for 50 dollars, almost 75 percent of her monthly salary.

But Rekha Devi isn't complaining. She says for the first time in her life she has dignity and a future.

Since I'm working here, she says, the condition of my house is good. But if I stop working the condition will become bad. This work gives me food and allows me to live properly.

Fellow rag picker Shankar now hopes other poor people will get involved in similar projects, schemes that not just recycle, but help build lives across the world.

Satinder Bindra for GLOBAL CHALLENGES, NEW DELHI.

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