To provide high value energy successfully, Light Up Malawi looks at the availability of resources in a new way.
Our approach is to address and eliminate the key constraints, leverage multiple needs, and focus on the one input point that yields the greatest value. By focusing on one critical need in the right way, we can create markets and opportunities for people to achieve success on their own.
Food Security is the national priority, and 85% of Malawians depend on agriculture for their incomes.
Malawi produces enough food to feed its citizens, but many Malawians are still food insecure due to a number of complex systemic challenges. These causes range from changing climate patterns, lack of energy for irrigation, inadequate infrastructure, and inaccessible markets for selling produce.
Post-Harvest Losses: In Malawi, 20% of the food harvested is ‘lost’ before it consumed.
Causes of post-harvest loss range from black market activity, hoarding and inadequate storage, to animals eating the food and or produce simply rotting from too much residual moisture.
If we can help eliminate the 20% post harvest losses, not only will Malawians have more food to eat, but the country will be able to export their excess to other countries in need. Exportable goods and bringing dollars into the country improves Malawi’s ability to support itself, and buy what it can’t produce within the country.
Energizing Post Harvest Agribusiness Centers:
We are working to power centers for post-harvest food processing and micro-entrepreneur supporting resources. There are many secondary benefits to our model but the immediate value is bringing markets to farmers. At these locations, farmers can sell their grain and work with us to process their own food. This saves them the time of drying and grinding their maize meal- and lets our partners add nutrients to enhance the lives of farmers families, giving children support for proper mental and physical development.
The critical element to this plan is gasification of corn cobs to create energy.
What couldn’t be done with solar power or wind power alone, we can do by gasifying corn cobs. This waste product, brought to us and sold to us by the farmers, can power high kWh demand processing machinery. The cost for this project and scale is easily within our reach as we work with technology partners who work diligently to develop these resources.
The greatest challenge is not the technology, but the implementation and supply chain development. The capital equipment costs for this model are far below the amounts required if you were to develop these projects via solar or wind energy alone, and the inherent value of market development by paying the farmers for local resources is extremely high.
Alternatively, if you were to depend on diesel fueled generation, availability problems and minimum market costs of $6/gallon fuels are far from ideal. At the times of greatest demand, availability decreases and the costs on the informal market are closer to $9/gallon.
Global Food Security- The Ideal Point of Impact:
UN World Food Program and Millennium Challenge Corporation- MOU
The WFP and MCC recently signed and released a Memorandum of Understanding regarding the funding of post-harvest agribusiness centers. While we did not know they were heading in this direction, the problems encountered in Malawi by the WFP’s P4P program are the specific challenges we have been researching and working to address.
However, energy is still the key to success for the WFP and MCC’s post-harvest agribusiness projects.
It’s nice to learn that a good idea is shared by others. For more information on Light Up Malawi’s plans and goals, please contact Ryan@lightupmalawi.org