MALI: Malian weed brings electricity to rural villages, helps conserve environment

Record ID: 454990

  • Title: MALI: Malian weed brings electricity to rural villages, helps conserve environment
  • Date: 8th June 2007
  • Summary: MACHINE GRINDING MILLET
  • Embargoed: 23rd June 2007 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Mali
  • Country: Mali
  • Topics: Environment / Natural World,Energy
  • Reuters ID: LVA8PIZUBRKO4ZD39K2E7KSCQ11
  • Story Text: As the rest of the world marks International Environment Day, villagers in rural Mali are turning to oil from the Jatropha weed for their energy needs. Interest in biofuels is booming around the world, triggered by high oil prices, energy security fears, limited spare refinery capacity and concerns about climate change. Like most villagers in rural Mali, the residents of Simidji have been living without mains electricity, waking with the sun to tend their cotton, rice and groundnut fields and retiring with their families when night falls.
    But, a humble shrub which grows on the side of the main road through the village is revolutionising their lives. By crushing the seeds of the hardy jatropha plant, long considered largely useless, the villagers can power a small generator with its oil, enough to run 40 streetlights and give 60 families power by night
    "Now with the advantage of the light we are able to peel our groundnuts and work the karité nuts. We can cut the leaves for our food and bundle the firewood that we are selling and we also sit around and chat," says Sira Bagayogo, a house wife and farmworker.
    Simidji is one of around 700 communities so far to have installed a generator which can run on the plant oil, part of a state-run project to electrify the former French colony's 12,000 villages at a price affordable to their inhabitants.
    "I've had my television since last year. It was difficult to get the battery charged as we had to go up to Ouelessebougou which is of 50 km distance. Now we can charge here and we are happy with that," says Drama Bagayogo, a chauffeur.
    The generators, housed in mud brick huts, also power a small millet grinder and a dehusker to process nuts.
    Africa produces a range of crops that could be use to make biofuel, including sugar cane, sugar beet, maize, sorghum and cassava - all of which can be used to make ethanol - and groundnuts, whose oil can be used to power diesel engines.
    Some scientists argue that using such crops for fuel in some of the poorest parts of the world risks worsening food shortages. But jatropha, an inedible shrub, can be grown alongside other crops. It repels insects, needs little care and can grow in the most arid land, preventing soil erosion and making it ideal as a natural fence to protect other plants.
    Interest in biofuels is booming around the world, triggered by high oil prices, energy security fears, limited spare refinery capacity and concerns about climate change.
    Some developing countries are hoping to cash in on the boom: the president of neighbouring Senegal wants Africa to become the world's primary supplier of biofuels.
    "You have to create conditions. What are the conditions today? They begin getting used to electricity, the milling of grains, the charging of batteries - but you need fuel for this and the fuel is not available here. But it could be provided they engage themselves in the cultivation of jatropha." says Aboubacar Samake, head of the Jatropha Programme at the government-funded National Centre for Solar and Renewable Energy.
    Mali hopes eventually to have all its rural villages running on jatropha and other renewable energy sources such as solar power, making them self-sufficient and leaving the farming industry less vulnerable to fluctuations in world oil prices.
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