Cooperation and compromise in developing rural communities—Case study: solar-electric mini-grids for the Maasai PI: Kisioki Moitiko (
kisiokim@gmail.com) with co-PI Robert Lange, The International Collaborative for Science, Education, and the Environment (Tanzania) ICSEE(T)
U.S. Partner: Krister Andersson, University of Colorado
Project dates: September 2014 to February 2016
The Maasai Stoves & Solar Project, another ICSEE(T) effort, provides household-scale solar power systems along with clean cookstoves. There are 750 homes in Maasai villages with these improvements. A Maasai community is organized in bomas which consist of the houses of the wives of one man, and of others arranged around a corral. The people want solar power--they are off the electric grid and won't get on it any time soon. To introduce solar electrical systems in rural settings, it may be better to work with groups of houses rather than each one alone, in the process learning some general principles that could have application in scaling and in other communities. This project will study this assumption by creating boma-wide mini-grid solar electric systems that are likely to better serve their needs if done well. A boma represents a larger-scale social and economic formation. In spite of its apparent homogeneity, there are complexities of status and of relationships among women, among children, and between everyone and the dominant and subdominant men. This makes a boma a microcosm that can reveal issues that are of importance to development actors and scientists. In the course of the project, this research team will introduce and study shared renewable energy resources to see if they better meet development and social goals. As scientists, they will uncover new and interesting dynamics where authority and unequal power and wealth influence what can be harmoniously accomplished in a community. They will stay in close consultation with their U.S. partner throughout this work.
This PEER project is built on the foundation provided by the Maasai Stoves & Solar Project of the ICSEE(T). The ICSEE(T) has put women at the center of its program from the start. Maasai women helped design the stove distributed by the project, and that is the reason its use is sustained without exception by hundreds of women in Maasai villages. Women’s teams in each village become the mafundi, the experts in bricklaying, cement mixing, chimney construction and stove installation. The organization has been recognized by the Global Alliance as a leader in their resource book ”Scaling Adoption of Clean Cooking Solutions through Women’s Empowerment.” Maasai women are an example of those all over the world whose lives are narrow, dominated by menial labor, and with limited opportunities. ICSEE(T)’s work with them is exemplary and recognized as breaking this pattern. The research will require ideas from the community, collaboration and agreement, and finally the physical labor to install the trial mini-grid elements that will be the basis for study in the research. Women will lead and participate in all stages and tasks.
Final Summary of Project ActivitiesThis project ended in 2016. Before the PEER project, the ICSEE, in its Maasai Stoves & Solar Project, provided solar systems for single households with a panel, light, battery and mobile cell phone charger. Their goal with the PEER project was to understand and solve the scientific, technical, and social problems that arise in moving from single household solar systems to cooperative and shared solar electrical systems based in Maasai bomas, each comprised of 5 to 20 homes.
This research was done in the course of installing micro-grid solar systems in 10 bomas. The leadership of the ICSEE(T) and their staff were deeply involved in this and still are. In addition, the research leader and students from the Community Development Training Institute (CDTI), were brought in and collaborated on the project as well. Their NSF funded partners were experts in studying the social and political issues that arise in cooperative use of commonly valued resources when interests and resources among the people are diverse and potentially in conflict. A Maasai boma is small but socially complex and as a micro-grid links and involves the entire community, the project was interested in how the diversity of interests, status, wealth, and authority in the boma would be stimulated and impacted by the utilization of this community system. Social diversity in bomas can be described as, “The principal residents are the several wives of a particular man. His authority is great, but he is not often in the boma and the women, his wives, have a social order they maintain among themselves. They are of different age, and became wives at different times. They have different wealth, and both due to their own personalities and status and because of their different relationships to the common husband have different command over common interests of the boma. There are others living in a bomas and they might be sons of the principal man, or wives of his sons, or sisters of some of his wives. Added to this are all the children of all the women."
The project team was also very interested in, and concerned about, the technology itself and the design and utility of a micro-grid in such a social unit. Because of the way pastoralists organize their living structures, bomas are the natural and proper unit for bringing renewable and off-the-grid electricity to the pastoralists, which has applications more broadly across Africa. The project team provided training to Maasai men and women in the science and engineering of solar energy, solar electrifications, photo voltaics and the basics of electricity. 22 people attended our intensive three-day workshop in December of 2015 and subsequently became the installers of the micro grids made possible by the Putnam Foundation grant and the payment by the Maasai boma owners.
CTDI categorized both the population and the conditions of life in selected bomas prior to the micro-grid installation. The team had originally been concerned that the social inhomogeneity of even the small population of a boma might give rise to interesting social phenomena of the type studied by their US partners at the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado in other development contexts. If such differences in ideas and participation in boma electrification were important, then they would need to be taken into account in scaling and proliferating such electrification campaigns. But because of the three points above dominating the social and technological aspects of such electrification, there were no significant issues arising related to differences of status in the bomas.
The CDTI research team also visited bomas after electrification and interviewed residents at some length. Not surprisingly, what they found was an awareness in the people of just the improvements of conditions and as would be predicted by those who know Maasai traditional living conditions and who know what a clean, smoke-removing, cookstove and electric lighting can be for people living under basic conditions far from the electrical grid, with 12 hours of darkness per day, and with heavy burdens of gathering fuel and water and child care.
Immediate changes for the boma residents included:
