Energy projects are fighting hunger – and much more
Mary Valesoa has seen cycles of fierce drought grip her village of Fenoaivo, in southern Madagascar. Leaves turning brown and shrivelling. May-June sweet potato harvests that never arrive. Children showing signs of acute malnutrition – and some even dying, during one particularly harsh and unrelenting dry spell – in a country on the front lines of climate change.
“Our life is summed up by drought,” says Valesoa, a local health care agent who also heads a women’s farming association.
But today, Fenoaivo and other vulnerable communities across southern Africa and beyond have found an antidote: a multipronged rural development initiative spearheaded by the World Food Programme (WFP) that delivers water, energy, connectivity and new income sources, among many other benefits.
Known as the Rapid Rural Transformation initiative, it is being rolled out in six southern African countries and elsewhere on the continent. The aim is to kickstart rural development and promote food security through solar-powered pumps and irrigation systems, skills training and digital platforms that deliver education and health care to extremely remote rural areas.
The initiative triggers other spin-offs: from women’s empowerment to fighting deforestation and enriching depleted soils. It counts among the many ways WFP is supporting sustainable energy projects across Africa that are fighting hunger and powering development.
“Through the access to electricity and water, we are empowering communities by providing them with all the tools and the resources they need to face future climate shocks in a more independent and sustainable way,” says WFP Madagascar Resilience Officer Federico Remonda.
Supercharging affordable power solutions across Africa is the focus of a key energy summit next week in Tanzania. Gathering heads of state, the private sector, civil society and humanitarian partners like WFP, it aims to tackle the sizeable energy deficit on the continent, where 600 million Africans live without power – a key roadblock in achieving sustainable food security and reducing hunger across the continent.
But in Madagascar – an island nation off the coast of East Africa where roughly 7 in 10 people have no electricity and 1.3 million face acute hunger – WFP and our partners are helping to change the energy and food security landscape. Working with the Government in Androy and Anosy – two of the country’s most climate-vulnerable regions where hunger and child malnutrition are rife – we are establishing solar hubs, internet connectivity and sustainable clean water sources for thousands of people.
“These projects benefit the whole community,” says WFP technician Mikendrema Avimaro, describing a raft of other paybacks, from digital classrooms, clean energy for cooking and online health services, to creating jobs in welding, hairdressing, hydroponic farming and meat processing. “They all help.”
Meeting food needs
In the Anosy region, Valesoa describes how the WFP project has brought her community drip irrigation, business training, and new know-how in areas ranging from raising chickens and goats, to money management and the importance of healthy diets.
Thanks to training, “I now teach farming in my own village and have learned where to sell our harvests,” she says. “So with proper training, we will be able to meet our food needs, even if WFP withdraws from the project.”
She describes more difficult days: a searing 2021 drought that brought intense hunger and malnutrition to her village. “Children under 5 years old died,” Valesoa remembers of the worst drought to hit southern Madagascar in 40 years. “There were six of them.”
“When we still kids, we had rains, and we used only rainwater,” says another farmer, 70-year-old Jeanette Famba. But the rains have dried up, and “right now we use the water fountain” or irrigation, under the WFP initiative.
The rural transformation project is powering up other communities elsewhere in Africa, while also helping them cope with a rapidly changing climate.
In Namibia, WFP has rolled out similar a rapid rural development initiative in two regions, which is delivering banking, educational, training and job opportunities.
In Niger, WFP is tapping the sun and sustainable biogas to establish solar-powered pumps for farming and drinking, and clean stoves for home and school cooking, for populations affected by conflict.
“In the past, we had to draw water from wells, a tiring and labour-intensive task,” says farmer Zibo Hamidou, from Niger’s southwestern Tillaberi region. “Today, thanks to solar panels and motorized pumps, we simply wait for sunrise to start our activities.”
With water available through the year, farmers enrolled in the WFP projects can water their crops, even if rains are scarce. “The transformation is undeniable,” Hamidou adds.
Empowering women
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where WFP is piloting seven rapid transformation schemes, farmer Faustina describes the projects’ multiple paybacks for her community in Nsele, an impoverished rural area outside the capital, Kinshasa.
“I have solar panels so I can read at night,” says Faustina, who heads a women’s association. “Thanks to water taps WFP has installed, I have a well that does not dry up.”
She and other farmers also received training on ways to improve their farming practices – including enriching depleted soils – as well as literacy and accounting classes.
Along with building women’s businesses, Faustina says, the skills are changing their standing in communities. “Men have started to consider that women have a place,” she says, “and that’s what’s good in our eyes.”
The initiative is also teaching communities how to regenerate soils, plant fast-growing trees and find clean and sustainable fuel sources that do not contribute to cutting down forest – in a country with the world’s second-biggest rainforest.
“There is an enthusiasm among the population,” says Blandine Legonou, a rural transformation expert for WFP in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, describing how boreholes and standing water pipes have ended the days when women walked miles to fetch water. They can also store fish to sell at market, thanks to solar-powered fridges.
“With electricity, children can study at night,” she adds. “They can learn with computers – something they would never have been able to do” without power.
