Local churches took a particular interest and we spoke to several thousand people in five different churches on one Sunday morning sharing the vision for solar power in rural areas. Because many of the churches are actively engaged with rural communities they saw the benefits straight away.
We have partnered with a local Nigerians to set-up Guguplex Nigeria Ltd. and ran a solar workshop for over 150 people on the possibilities and benefits of solar systems and had several approach us with a view to becoming distributors of our products.
We installed three solar systems in rural areas in two houses and a church and a water pumping system in a communal well and have left another 6 systems to be installed by Guguplex Nigeria over the coming month. These early installations are giving us excellent feedback on the performance of the systems and how people are using them which allows us to improve the systems and how they are configured. We quickly realised that even in basic village homes people wanted 4+ lights even if they were all not used at the same time as many homes are made up of multiple small rooms rather than large open plan living areas.
The other revelation was the amount of money people spend powering generators. Nigeria is the world's largest import market for generators and all though cheap to buy, running costs even with the heavily subsidised local petrol soon mount up. We were able to demonstrate to people how over a 3 year period a generator would be 2-3 times as expensive to run as a similarly functional solar system.
We are now planning to make available a significant number of solar systems in Nigeria by February due to the demand we had and the market potential within Nigeria. Both awareness of and availability of solar equipment there is quite low so we have a big opportunity to educate and inform people as to what is now possible with solar technology.
Below are some of the images of our adventures - there is now Light where previously there was none!
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