Solar Education

Educate about the benefits of solar power and other alternative energies, for both the people and nature.

There is a reason they call it ‘seeing the light‘. Not just because of the Disney comics where an old-fashioned light bulb was drawn close to the faces of the characters. Discovering new knowledge is one of the greatest joys of life.

Who taught you about solar power?

They are so happy that the lights do not need batteries. They are quite excited to explain that you just put the light out in the sun during the day and then it works at night.

(Sheila, reporting about our LED lights from the refugee camp in Liberia)

Young adults in secondary school, Tanzania. Smart, curious and hungry for knowledge.

Who told you about solar power? Of course you will have learned about the power of the sun on a hot day inside an office building or when tending to 2nd degree burns after a nap on the sunny beach.

But when did you learn about the fact that that power could be transformed into energy that can be re-used, for example to light a house?

Maybe you had one of those small pocket calculators when you were young. These magically never needed any batteries, but instead had this little strip of brown/grey blocks and if you covered them with your finger, your calculator’s display went dim. They have been around for decades.

Solar water cooker in Tanzania. Solar knowledge leads to more usage.

Curious people want to know more about such things and it is often the curious people that are able to think outside the box and progress a society.

They only need a seed and their imagination and knowledge will grow. All current scientists, inventors and businesspeople working with solar have been inspired at some point and saw the light.

But if your parents raise you in a mud house, where you have no electricity, let alone TV to learn about these things? Even if you are amongst the fortunate that can go to school, most of your teachers won’t even know about solar energy and have no way of showing you.

Often, they still use worn books, decades old, or those that have been donated by churches and only focus on customs of 2000 years ago, not on much needed new solutions for current problems.

Mutual education is part of our project

Children performing play about AIDS in primary school, Tanzania. This knowledge can save their lives.

Many ‘uneducated’ or otherwise poor people have such a great knowledge about life that many in the western world have long forgotten.

Wisdom about social structures, about how to live in coexistence with nature, how to grow food and feed yourselves without taking more than you need. We can learn from that and can offer knowledge about positive science in return.

Not so long ago AIDS was denied by many schools in Africa and children had no idea about how to prevent it. This image shows a religious school that now uses a school play to teach all children and young adults about the real causes and dangers of AIDS, which is much needed knowledge that simply was not available or not shared before.

We want to exchange and expand knowledge as part of our projects to replace kerosene lamps by solar-powered LED lights. Partly this will happen just because our lights will spark the curiosity of those that have the thirst for knowledge.

It is not just the enabling of studying at home that will benefit the students. Once a solar-powered light will arrive in their hands, they will start to wonder: how does this work? What else can I do with this technology? Can I improve my life with this?

We also will supply education materials for the teachers and will give the often underfunded schools a chance to earn money by helping with the distribution. This way, the benefits of solar energy can be discussed as part of the curriculum and the seed of future leaders will be planted.

Poverty is declining, energy use is rising.

The good news is that more and more countries are falling off the poverty list. Of course this also means that the demands for energy will rise as more people will have houses, and more will want electric appliances, cars etc. More energy demand means higher prices for everybody and more pollution in the world.

Unless clean and unlimited and free energy is used.

Children in secondary school, Tanzania

What you learn as a kid, you will practice when you are older.

The developing nations now have some great opportunities to leapfrog ahead regarding the usage of clean energy.

Not only is solar energy very viable due to the much higher costs of fossil energies, but they can build a new and much better energy infrastructure from scratch.

Most people that own cellphones in the developing world never had a fixed line. They skipped that expensive and fragile infrastructure and went straight to mobile phones.

If we can teach the future leaders about the benefits of solar-power and alternative energy right now, they can make that same jump ahead again. This will not only be great for all the reasons mentioned on this site (see the images below this article for details) but it will benefit everybody on our planet.

We need your help

Children in primary school, Tanzania. Often there are simply no books available to teach about technology.

There is no point in repeating existing work, so if you represent an organisation that already has high-quality teaching materials that we can share here on the website and during our projects in developing countries, please contact us.

We love to hear from you and think about how we can improve knowledge together.

Also if you are a writer, artist, advocate of clean energy or anybody else that can help us improve our planet, let us know!