All aboard for green energy in Central Africa!
This Tuesday saw a glimpse into the future for the villagers of Loubassa in the Republic of Congo. After months of studies and development, the floating tidal turbine that will power an “essential services unit” (ESU) on the Congo River in the coming months is undergoing testing on the Rhône in Lyon. This represents an unprecedented programme in enabling everyone to access green energy, which will improve the local residents’ living conditions in a sustainable manner.
A local and sustainable solution
Rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa have one of the lowest electrification levels in the world (12%). The lack of a secure source of power throughout the country is preventing the fundamental development of agriculture and forcing the local population to live off imported products up to 75% of the time. However, this is one great paradox, as we know this region boasts significant natural resources (soil, sun and water), with the Congo River and its tributaries in particular being able to provide enough to meet the local populations’ needs both in terms of electricity and drinking water.
It is in this light that a Franco-Congolese consortium consisting of Pot@maï, a French non-profit organisation specialising in renewable energies, L’Aquaphile, a French supplier of floating tidal turbines and Aide à l’Enfance, a Congolese non-profit organisation, decided to install a floating tidal turbine on the Congo River and an essential services unit in the village of Loubassa.
This project will improve the local populations’ living conditions in a sustainable manner and create economic activity in the landlocked villages close to the rivers: drinking water, cold storage, battery charging, communications, transformation of agriculture and fishing products, and machines and tools for craftspeople. Capable of generating and using energy around the clock, the ESU will supply almost 3,000 inhabitants of two villages with local, green energy. This site will also be used to train and provide jobs for young craftspeople and farmers.
It is a worthwhile project that once again fulfils the Foundation’s commitment to offering access to energy for all, and it could not be achieved without a green conscience.
SCHOOLS, LIGHTS AND RIGHTS : because every child have the right to education & energy
SCHOOLS : WHEN LIGHT COMES TO SCHOOL
The “Schools” part of the program has electrified six schools or drop-in centers in rural villages in Africa, Asia or Madagascar. The solar panels installed on the roofs of the schools by the volunteers of Energy Assistance France, an internal NGO of the ENGIE Group, bring not only the light but they also allow to innovate and to enrich the educational courses: digital rooms equipped with computers were created in Afghanistan, in partnership with the association Afghanistan Libre, to train girls to digital code and jobs.
– 6 electrified schools
– More than 3,000 beneficiaries
– 5 digital rooms created in Afghanistan, benefiting to 630 girls trained to digital jobs
LIGHTS: TO STUDY AT NIGHTFALL
Thanks to the “Lights” component, nearly thirty-five thousand pocket solar lamps have been distributed to schoolchildren, especially in rural villages that are not connected to the electricity grid. The solar-charged lamps have a battery life of more than thirty hours and allow children to return from school at dusk and do their homework at home.The use of lamps also makes communities and families aware of the benefits of renewable energies.
– 34,700 solar lights distributed
– 30 hours of battery life, with a light charge indicator and an SOS Flash mode
RIGHTS: GIVE BACK THEIR RIGHTS TO GHOST CHILDREN
In the world, one in seven people does not have a civil status. In Africa, according to the UNICEF, nearly 50% of the population is not registered. For “ghost children” without identity they simply do not have access to school or health and later, to employment. This is why the rights section of the program is a priority. On the spot, the partner associations of La Voix De l’Enfant are mobilizing to give ghost children an identity and convince parents to enroll their children in school. The most spectacular action has been taken in DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), but many children have received the sesame in other countries where the program is located, including South Africa, Madagascar and Afghanistan.
– 1 million civil status distributed in the DRC
– 3,000 “Tazkira” (IDs) distributed to Afghan girls
– 2,000 young South Africans received their papers in Gauten Province
A SYNERGY WITH THE ENGIE FOUNDATION PARTNERS
Three associations already partners of the ENGIE Foundation are mobilized to deploy the Schools, Lights and Rights program on the spot: Afghanistan Libre, Valued Citizens Initiative (South Africa), Sourires d’Enfants (Laos).
The Foundation participates in the electrification of two secondary schools in Ethiopia
Energy Assistance volunteers brought their expertise to the local population in a rural area of the Woreda (district) of Mirab Abaya, more than 100 km from the national power grid.
The project ?To take advantage of the excellent solar radiation available all year round in the region, to provide electricity to two high schools using solar photovoltaic technology. In total, 11 buildings and 34 classrooms have benefited from clean and sustainable electricity since the beginning of the year. This programme enabled the 800 schoolchildren who benefited from it to return to the national education programme thanks to computers and video recorders that were also powered by solar panels.
These two projects, partly funded by the ENGIE Foundation, were carried out in collaboration with Arba Minch University, which helped to transport Arba Minch’s equipment to the sites and provided a technician to assist with installation and ensure the project’s sustainability over time.
An association of ENGIE Group employees
Created in Belgium by active and retired ENGIE employees, Energy Assistance brings together volunteers from the Group’s energy business sectors and power grid distributors. Target To use the skills and expertise of its members, supported by ENGIE’s technical resources, to assist humanitarian projects aimed at populations that do not have access to essential energy services, on all continents.
They offer their expertise for:
– decentralised energy production to supply clinics, schools, orphanages with renewable energy;
– the construction and connection of mini grids to supply electricity to remote communities ;
– the rehabilitation of electrical facilities.
Energy Assistance projects mostly use photovoltaic solar energy, but experts also use hydropower or wind power when conditions and geography make it possible. The association is committed to a long-term partnership with local beneficiaries in order to ensure the sustainability of its achievements (training).
KNOW MORE :
– Project description
– The website of Energy Assistance asbl
2019-2020: 3rd phase of the Schools, Lights and Rights program
The ENGIE Foundation, which initiated the innovative and transversal “Schools, Lights and Rights” program with its historical partner La Voix De l’Enfant, decided to continue and develop it in a third phase in 2019-2020.
So, these are:
– More than 21,000 additional portable solar lamps to be distributed in 9 countries: Afghanistan, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, India, Madagascar, Morocco, Democratic Republic of Congo and Laos. These solar lights will allow children to do their homework at night, read and be safe on their way home from school. These solar lights will be donated to local schools and associations to distribute to children and ensure their proper use. Renewable energy and environmental awareness will also be provided to these children, as well as to local populations.
– More than 161,000 additional civil status records should be completed. Since the introduction of this program in 2015, we count the establishment of more than 1 million civil states for children attending these schools: registration of children in civil status and awareness activities with families and local authorities.
– 2 to 3 schools and additional reception facilities should be electrified in collaboration with Energy Assistance France, an NGO within the ENGIE Group (symbol of the voluntary commitment of employees who put their skills at the service of humanitarian projects).
This program combines access to energy, education and civil rights. It is why it is innovative and its digitization for the registration of the civil states will make it exponential.
Because the world of tomorrow cannot be conceived without light, because energy is a condition for access to education, health, economic activity, and well-being, because the establishment of civil states allows every child to be protected and to have access to his rights, the ENGIE Foundation continues the deployment of this flagship program!
“These little lamps do not look like anything, but they change the life” (Martine BROUSSE – President of La Voix De l’Enfant).
Update on the solar panel project at the PSE school in Cambodia
Last June, the NGO Pour un Sourire d’Enfant (For a Child’s Smile, PSE) installed a photovoltaic generator at its school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The aim? To allow the 2,200 children to study in better conditions and improve their knowledge of their environment. Four months after it began operating, we take a look out how the project is doing.
An ambitious project, part of a wider sustainability approach
The project has been a great success. The photovoltaic generator provides enough power to meet the school’s day-to-day needs and the NGO’s teams use modern technology to monitor the system’s performance in real time.
The installation demonstrates PSE’s commitment to sustainable development. The NGO has incorporated awareness of renewable energy and biodiversity into its educational approach. In all, around 2,200 youngsters and 650 adults have learnt about the sustainability approach through events such as Two Weeks for the Environment, Passion for Saving the Environment, talks, activities and training modules on environmental issues.
With the support of the ENGIE Foundation, the NGO has also acquired equipment such as batteries and inverters, which are used in students’ practical training at the PSE School of Building Trades. Among other things, they learn how solar panels work and how to install and maintain them.
Video produced by the PSE Institute’s School of Media in Phnom Penh.
Find out more
• A photovoltaic generator for the For a Child’s Smile school in Phnom Penh
The "visual language" created, used and interpreted by and for the global refugee population
Created by Bryan Mc Cormack in September 2016, Yesterday Today Tomorrow (YTT) started out as a conceptual art project with the intention of giving the refu- gee population their own singular, common voice by creating a visual language that can be communicated by every man, woman and child, independently of nationality, education, language or dialect spoken.
So far, Yesterday Today Tomorrow has visited and worked in 27 camps and squats in 8 countries across Europe, collaborating with seve- ral hundred refugees. Each refugee receives 3 sheets of paper and colored pens and is invited to draw 3 sketches: One of their life before: Yesterday. One of their current life: Today. And one of their life imagi- ned in the future: Tomorrow.
However, as Yesterday Today Tomorrow has developed, so too has it’s objectives. What was once a conceptual art project has now become a fully-fledged International Project with very specific goals that are broken-down into 3 main categories.
The creation of educational/ pedagogical tools
Since the beginning, YTT has collaborated with Sheffield Hallam University to develop series of masterclasses, research modules and workshops with the performance students of the university. The objective is to create a pedagogical tool (a schools workshop protocol) by combining refugee drawings and performance techniques to educate students on the refugee crisis through the exploration and embodiment of the refugee drawings collected as part of YTT.
YTT has also started to collaborate with the Department of Education at Roma University with special expertise in Child Development, Cognitive Development, Developmental Psychopathology and Nonver- bal Communication to create an educational program for primary-school pupils and the training on that program for the pre-service teachers.
The creation of psychosocial programs and clinical assessment tools
YTT will begin the research on clinical assessment tools, protocols and psychosocial programs that can be used, through the YTT drawing workshops and it’s digital database, by volunteers in refugee camps and conflict zones around the world. With the aim to help refugees cope better with war and displacement and signal mental health complications for which refugees, and above all children, are at an extremely high risk of suffering from. And/or as a “first-contact/ presentational tool” for refugee comprehension suitable and adaptable to most refugee initiatives around the world. This research will involve further collaboration with universities, academic and specialized institutions and also broaden-out to psychological and linguistic development research. As well as involving future educators with training on the use of YTT as a tool to create emotional and comprehensible contact with refugees/migrant population and as a visual language “platform” to share their experiences.
The artistic interpretation of this visual language
The people who should visualize and give voice to this humanitarian disaster are the refugees themselves. YTT maps out, as a cultural and visual memory, the global exodus of people. Moreover, by participating in the creation of these drawings, the refugees are leaving their own trace, creating their own contemporary culture and voice whilst simul- taneously losing all traceability of their inherited culture. Traceability is credibility, without it, the existence of a people disappears. Each refugee drawing counts. Each refugee drawing is a voice. Every voice counts.
A photovoltaic generator for the For a Child's Smile School (PSE) in Phnom Penh
For 20 years, the Cambodian association Pour Un Sourire d’Enfant (PSE), meaning For a Child’s Smile, has been striving to get children out of extreme poverty. In 2017, PSE built a School of Sales Management (EGV) in Phnom Penh. A few weeks ago, the association inaugurated a photovoltaic generator in the school grounds, allowing 2,200 children to study in better conditions and improve their knowledge of their environment.
Energy savings and environmental awareness
Energy savings and environmental awarenessThe photovoltaic generator on the new campus of the School of Management and Sales run by the NGO For a Child’s Smile (PSE) has just been installed. Thanks to the solar energy generated by the new system, PSE envisages saving around $12,000 a year on the energy bill of its centre in Phnom Penh (Cambodia). Every day, nearly 2,200 children and young people living in extreme poverty come to study at the centre, the remedial school or the association’s Professional Training Institute (FPA), where 450 young students live as boarders.
In addition to the savings it enables the NGO to make, the installation of the solar generator helps to heighten the awareness of the young Cambodians supported by PES of renewable energy and biodiversity. The association has integrated such awareness-raising into its educational approach. With the generator commissioned this month, PSE invited all the centre’s children to take part in the second edition of its World Environment Day, organised on 5 June, which was followed up by a fortnight focusing on the environment, comprising courses, conferences and activities organised for all the children.
Learn more by clicking here!
We Love Green festival 2018 in the Bois de Vincennes
The weekend of June 2-3, 2018 sees the return of We Love Green, with its rich and eclectic programme, its innovative ideas and its aspiration to change the world. The ENGIE Foundation is proud to be a partner of Paris’s greenest festival for another year!
What’s on at We Love Green 2018
What’s on at We Love Green 2018Featuring over 60 concerts, talks, exhibitions and screenings, We Love Green takes place this weekend in the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern edge of Paris. Between 60 and 70,000 festivalgoers are expected this year, with artists including Björk, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jamie XX and Orelsan set to perform on the site’s two stages. But We Love Green is about more than just music. From the outset, the festival has embraced an eco-friendly ethos, powering its facilities with renewable energy, managing and recycling waste and water, and raising public awareness about organic and local food and recycling, among other commitments.
Another fixture of We Love Green since 2013 is the Think Tank, an ‘ideas lab’ at the heart of the festival which aims to raise maximum awareness of major social and environmental challenges. This year, the Think Tank is rising to new heights in a bid to gain a better overview of the issues facing our planet. Are we really alone in the universe? What is the overview effect? Will we soon need to find another habitable planet after exhausting the resources of Planet Earth? How do we combine technological progress with protecting the world around us? These questions will be addressed in a series of talks, panel discussions and exchanges between the public and guest speakers scheduled throughout the weekend to promote environmentally responsible innovation and come up with practical ideas for our planet. This year’s special guests on the Think Tank stage include philosopher Catherine Larrère, forestry researcher and engineer Ernst Zürcher, economist and author Jacques Attali and oceanographer Patricia Ricard.
As well as talks, there will also be screenings of films from around the world. Located at the heart of the festival, the new screening area will feature a varied programme of films, documentaries and immersive virtual-reality experiences. Finally, in the Think Tank arena, festivalgoers will get to meet 30 start-up companies who will be showcasing their projects through hands-on workshops.
For more information and tickets, click here!
Focus: Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow
C’est la Semaine Européenne du Développement Durable (SEDD) du 18 septembre au 8 octobre 2020. Une semaine dédiée à la préservation de l’environnement et au développement durable. L’occasion, pour chacun de nous et pour la Fondation ENGIE, de partager des actions concrètes et ambitieuses pour imaginer le monde de demain !
The project in a nutshell
To create his project, the artist spent more than a year in dozens of camps across Europe, where he worked with hundreds of refugee children of many nationalities. He invited them to draw three sketches on three sheets of paper, one of their life before (Yesterday), one of their current life (Today) and one of their life imagined in the future (Tomorrow). The resulting drawings are striking and moving, often mingling the violence of the past, the bewilderment of the present and the difficulty of imagining the future. In three drawings, these refugees get to speak and do what human beings are born to do: tell a story, tell their own story.
The project also aims to disseminate these messages on social media, so that they become fantastic tools for raising public awareness about the plight of Europe’s refugees. You can find Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The artist: Bryan McCormack
Bryan McCormack was born in Dublin in 1972 but lives and works in Paris. Most of his work deals with specifically social and political topics. He has organised over 30 solo and group exhibitions in venues including the Centre Pompidou and UNESCO in Paris, the Empire Gallery in London and the Chopin Museum in Valldemossa. One of his monumental public works is a permanent installation in Paris’s Parc de Saint-Cloud.
The ENGIE Foundation works with and for women
Celebrated every year since 1977 in many countries around the world, International Women’s Day is as relevant today as ever…and will remain so until full equality between men and women is achieved. This year’s theme is ‘Time Is Now: Rural and Urban Activists Transforming Women’s Lives’.
Change could be now
This year’s International Women’s Day takes place against an unusual backdrop, following the unprecedented global movement championing women’s rights, equality and justice that has emerged in recent months. This has taken the form of global campaigns, including #MeToo in the US and its equivalents in other countries (#BalanceTonPorc in France, #YoTambién in Mexico and Spain, #QuellaVoltaChe in Italy, etc.) targeting sexual harassment and violence against women. This high-profile campaign has encouraged women to speak out and triggered a public debate on issues that sadly are still considered taboo. So the time is ripe to tackle the deep-seated inequalities between men and women and above all to effect change!
International Women’s Day 2018 is an opportunity to transform this momentum into action and to empower women in both rural and urban environments. Of the world’s 800 million illiterate individuals, 75% are women. And yet women are often the linchpins of development. They are innovators who work hard to improve the day-to-day lives of their families.
25 years of commitment to women
The ENGIE Foundation’s work reflects the need to support women-led projects worldwide. In the Philippines, the Barefoot Women Solar Engineers programme trains illiterate women to bring electricity to their villages. In France, the Ikambere programme empowers, facilitates access to rights and promotes the social inclusion and workforce integration of HIV-infected migrant women.
This year, the ENGIE Foundation wanted to do even more to help women by supporting new projects. The Women’s Empowerment programme run by American NGO CARE operates more than 1,000 projects in 94 countries, aimed at making women’s empowerment a major focus of the fight against poverty. Fondation des Femmes (Women’s Foundation) is a platform that raises funds from private institutions and individuals and redistributes them to organisations that promote women’s rights. Aware (Archives of Women Artists) aims to restore the presence of women artists in the history of art through a range of high-quality programmes, a dedicated website, symposiums and a prize supported by the French Ministry of Culture.
Women’s rights begin with girls’ rights, which is why the ENGIE Foundation is committed to providing a better future for thousands of girls affected by inequality and discrimination around the world, primarily by promoting access to education. This is the objective of the NGO PADEM in Kenya, which offers free education to teenage girls in the Kibera slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, and the Promoting Afghan Girls Education programme which has electrified 13 schools enabling 27,000 Afghan girls to access education. In South Africa, the iNSPIRE programme aims to rebuild the confidence of girls subjected to discrimination and exclusion, make them aware of their potential and empower them to contribute actively to the development of their country. The ENGIE Foundation believes that educating boys is key to changing mentalities, which is why it supported the UNESCO Open Campuses, which seek to make high-school students in educational priority areas more aware of major social issues such as gender equality. Last but not least, many programmes address the vital need to support girls who have been victims of violence by improving access to education and care. These include the TARA Girls programme in India, which provides accommodation, support and protection to girls affected by violence, including academic support, sporting and artistic activities, and awareness workshops on hygiene and health.
A different world with different women
International Women’s Day is also an opportunity to celebrate the activists who work tirelessly to champion women’s rights and help women to reach their full potential. As members of our Board of Directors or Selection Committees and as heads of charitable organisations, they give us the benefit of their expertise, commitment and endless determination. The ENGIE Foundation wishes to thank and pay tribute to these women, who fight daily to ensure that every girl and woman will one day be able to lead the life they choose.
Finally, the ENGIE Foundation has decided to support Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s forthcoming documentary Woman, scheduled for release in 2019, in which the renowned photographer and director will pay homage to all the women who, in their own way, change the world.