Mission 300
This is a World Bank important document that has to do with powering Sub-Saharan Africa. It is about a 5000-word stuff. We cannot take it all, but will substantially do so over the next couple of weeks knowing how important the subject of power is to growth of business in Africa. It came in a podcast. It is calling for the comments of readers. The first slot was published last Thursday.
Lindelwa Mtongana: That private investment will be crucial.
Ajay Banga: For the private sector, a lot of our friends and colleagues who are in this room, this effort represents both a challenge and an opportunity. We need your innovation. We need your efficiency. We need your people. We need your creativity. We need your capacity to scale. To facilitate your investment, we’ve identified those regulatory policy barriers. We are working to eliminate them.
Lindelwa Mtongana: Let’s hear one more time from the World Bank Group President on how increasing energy provision intersects with another fundamental challenge in development, jobs.
Ajay Banga: Our mission to address the fundamental challenge of providing electricity to half of this continent’s people, 300 million, who do not have access, this is just the critical first step. M-300 is the cornerstone of a jobs’ agenda. It is not just about electricity. It is not just about clean cooking. It is not just about healthcare. It is about people, and their optimism, and their hope for dignity. This is the cornerstone of a jobs’ agenda, it is the foundation for future development, and we would like to be your partners as we go forward.
Lindelwa Mtongana: Well, we wanted to find out more about the link between electrification and jobs. Our producer Sarah spoke to one entrepreneur in Zanzibar to hear about her experiences of running a business without reliable power.
Sarah Treanor: The intoxicating sounds of the Indian Ocean, where the Tanzanian Spice Islands of Zanzibar sit just off the coast of the mainland, a short ferry from the commercial hub of Dar es Salaam. It’s here that women have for decades gathered seaweed by hand to sell on for processing elsewhere. It might look like a romantic picture, groups of women wading just offshore from the beach to gather the seaweed, but this is labor-intensive work, and not always well paid. That’s where the company Mwani saw an opportunity to gather the seaweed and process it on site in Zanzibar to produce cosmetics which could be exported globally. The women would learn valuable skills and get paid a living wage.
Klaartje Schnade: You’ve got those beautiful turquoise, azure waters, and the tides coming in and out. And then, you’ve got these seaweed beds.
Sarah Treanor: Co-founder, Klaartje Schnade.
Klaartje Schnade: The farming always takes place according to the tidal calendar. We wait for the tide to ebb before we can go into the ocean. It is stunning. We really wanted to paint a very powerful picture of women doing fantastic things in their own right.
Sarah Treanor: The women chat and sing as they process the seaweed in Mwani’s small facility near the sea. I asked Klaartje to tell me about the process of extracting the nutrients from the seaweed.
Klaartje Schnade: It undergoes agitation, filtration, triple filtration, undergoes evaporation on increased surface areas and lower temperatures. It’s about a two-day process just to get about a gram, just under a gram, of seaweed extract.
Sarah Treanor: And Klaartje, what about the issue of energy? Tell me about your experiences with power.
Klaartje Schnade: Well, at the moment, we are on the grid. And we’re actually looking to start with biogas as well as solar power. We don’t use generators, simply because I really cannot stand the fact that we’d be polluting the air, and it feels so counterintuitive to what we do. So, there have been instances where we actually work at night, in order to be able to complete orders or more electricity-intense processes. It has actually been a pain point for our company. It’s a real sticking point. But what’s kept us going has been that we are passionate about the environment and passionate about the people that work with us. But yes, we do find that we have a lot of issues and challenges when it comes to long power-outs, inconsistent energy, our apparatus burning, despite stabilizers, not to mention potential fires from time to time, which happen across the island, which thankfully we have not had.
Sarah Treanor: So Klaartje, what about the women who work with you? What about the workforce? What kinds of issues do they experience, in terms of access to power?
Klaartje Schnade: They experience it more heavily than us. They’ll have to deal with extreme heat at night when there’s a power-out. I’m very lucky to be on the ocean. But you’ll have a workforce that basically can come in tired, because they’ve spent the night at really high temperatures without any sort of alleviation, such as air-con, or fans, or anything. It also means that children can’t do homework. It means that they have to come to us to ensure that they can charge their phones. So, it impacts the workforce quite a bit.
