SolarAid’s Light a Village project set an ambitious goal of connecting every household in Kasakula with electricity access. On the 26th of August, that goal was reached, as the Kasakula chief installed the final solar home system.
Back in 2021, SolarAid first piloted the Light a Village project with funding from the Turner Kirk Trust. Launched to address energy poverty in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, the pilot looked to develop a new scalable and thus potentially transformative model for distributing and maintaining solar energy systems across the sub-continent.
The project began by providing solar lighting systems to 500 households in TA Kasakula, Malawi – a rural community spread over 175 km2 in the Ntchisi District, where 97% of inhabitants live in extreme poverty. Historically, residents have relied on costly and unsafe forms of light, including burning straw fires, paraffin candles, and kerosene lamps.
Now, a significant milestone has been achieved: 100% of Kasakula’s 8,813 households, 12 schools, and the local health clinic have been lit up with clean lighting.
The project employs an Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) treating families as customers, not aid recipients. SolarAid handles installation, maintenance, and servicing free of charge, removing the up-front cost barrier. Then customers pay only for the energy they use, at a rate cheaper than the cost of candles and other fire sources.
With safe and affordable access to electricity, families in Kasakula are benefiting from improved safety, extended study and work hours, and better health from reduced smoke inhalation. Almost 100 local jobs have also been created for the installation and maintenance of the solar home systems.
But the work isn’t finished yet. Across Malawi, 84% of the population still lives without access to electricity (and this rate is significantly higher in rural areas).
Malawi’s Ministry of Energy is now working with SolarAid on a district-level scale-up of Light a Village in Ntchisi District, covering 80,000 homes.
SolarAid is also supporting the scale-up of the EaaS model in Sierra Leone and Senegal, in partnership with two other solar enterprises, Easy Solar and Moon, through REAL (Rural Energy Access Lab).
The groundbreaking milestone in Kasakula demonstrates that universal access to solar energy is achievable, even in the most remote and low-income communities. The project is gaining rapid traction and is on the cusp of delivering national and regional-level transformations in the lives of families across Sub-Saharan Africa.
As the project’s largest funder, the Turner Kirk Trust gave The Light a Village project “permission to fail”, allowing SolarAid to experiment with new methods of solving the problem of energy poverty, starting with Kasakula. Today, we know that taking that risk of failure is paying off.
"Today is a significant step in the right direction as we strive for inclusivity and universal access to energy. And tonight, as I spend the night in Kasakula, it will be the first time knowing that every family around me can simply flick a switch and light their homes with clean, safe light as the sun sets. Now the challenge is clear, to make that a lived reality for everyone, everywhere.”
