Pumulani means rest in Nyanja. The name of a local solar power training school, it is the motto espoused by the head instructor, a Dutch expat who started the school in response to demand and insight from the solar power company he and his wife run in the capital of Lusaka. His enterprise is truly amazing, but is dwarfed by his ambitions.

The school recently opened on their farm, isolated in the bush halfway between Kafue and Lusaka. Footprints of Duiker, Kudu, and Civet can be found in the dirt surrounding the complex, a large building complete enough to have started classes. After meeting the owner of the school, I imagine the school will be a work in progress for years to come, a playground of sorts for him to experiment with and teach renewable energy to the Zambian population and to further his own personal desire to tinker.

I was lucky enough to join one of the week long training courses in solar power. The class spanned from the theory of solar power to the design of solar power systems, including installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting. The classroom sessions quickly led to hands onexperiments with solar panels and batteries. The entire class constructed a full-blown system to power any number of devices by the week’s end.

There is a dire need for such expertise here. Knock off solar panels can be found in the cramped tin roofed market stalls, which may or may not be sold with all of the equipment required to make them work properly. Prices for the same equipment and installation vary dramatically between different local companies – some of whom may or may not actually know what they are doing. The training is open to anyone: rival company’s, technicians, engineers, and even consultants like me – all in the name of spreading information and giving people power.

Their aim isn’t just to create a school, but a center of renewable energy. They want to create a playground just off the main road at one edge of the farm, with games and toys designed to teach the basic mechanisms of renewable energy to youth in addition to the typical swings and slides. ‘Instill it in them early,’ as advocated by the proprietor. They are constructing a number of simple chalets for students during their course, for ‘fewer distractions and better focus on the material taught.’ His farm currently boasts a number of clever designs, including borehole pump powered by a solar panel that tracks the sun as it moves across the sky, a solar thermal hot water heater, and a fish pond provided with a stream of water from a solar powered pump – his goal is to completely power his farm and house off the Zambian grid, which can prove to be finicky at times, to say the least.

As of 2006, only 19% of Zambians had electricity. 49% of the urban population was electrified, 3.2% of the rural areas were. In a country with as sparse a rural population, getting electricity to the far reaches of the country is a daunting, if not impossible task for the foreseeable future.

One interesting conversation the class continually came back to, was theft of the panels. Evidently solar panels go like hot cakes once installed. One of the larger cell network providers here had to abandon solar powered cell phone towers in remote areas altogether. Their first installations showed the lack of consideration for theft, with panels in easily accessible and maintainable locations near the bottom of the towers. The next revision included a raised installation surrounded by a fence and barbed wire. The last revision reverted to a generator with a refueling truck making rounds to ensure the generators never die.

Another story told of a rural clinic powered by solar energy. When the in-charge discovered the panels had been stolen, the clinic was promptly closed with the promise not to reopen until the panels were returned. The panels were back in place 2 days later, and the clinic was reopened. The difference between these two stories conveys the mentality and approach needed to be successful here. Community trumps technology. Anything can be stolen by one means or another – but it takes the strength and unity of everyone for mutual security. In order to get the backing of the community, however, your system has to benefit the community in tangible ways.

We are installing solar power in a number of clinics – but its only to power a data collection system. There are no additional lights, vaccine fridges, or any immediate visible benefits from our solar power installation. In the long term, there is a great potential for the data system to improve health outcomes – the goal of the project is to reduce under five mortality by 30% within 5 years. How can you instill long term appreciation in the local population now, however, when the immediate desire for television, radio or lights can easily usurp the good intentions of the installation?

Pumulani means rest in Nyanja. The name of a local solar power training school, it is the motto espoused by the head instructor, a Dutch expat who started the school in response to demand and insight from the solar power company he and his wife run in the capital of Lusaka. His enterprise is truly amazing, but is dwarfed by his ambitions.

The school recently opened on their farm, isolated in the bush halfway between Kafue and Lusaka. Footprints of Duiker, Kudu, and Civet can be found in the dirt surrounding the complex, a large building complete enough to have started classes. After meeting the owner of the school, I imagine the school will be a work in progress for years to come, a playground of sorts for him to experiment with and teach renewable energy to the Zambian population and to further his own personal desire to tinker.

I was lucky enough to join one of the week long training courses in solar power. The class spanned from the theory of solar power to the design of solar power systems, including installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting. The classroom sessions quickly led to hands on experiments with solar panels and batteries. The entire class constructed a full-blown system to power any number of devices by the week’s end.

There is a dire need for such expertise here. Knock off solar panels can be found in the cramped tin roofed market stalls, which may or may not be sold with all of the equipment required to make them work properly. Prices for the same equipment and installation vary dramatically between different local companies – some of whom may or may not actually know what they are doing. The training is open to anyone: rival company’s, technicians, engineers, and even consultants like me – all in the name of spreading information and giving people power.

Their aim isn’t just to create a school, but a center of renewable energy. They want to create a playground just off the main road at one edge of the farm, with games and toys designed to teach the basic mechanisms of renewable energy to youth in addition to the typical swings and slides. ‘Instill it in them early,’ as advocated by the proprietor. They are constructing a number of simple chalets for students during their course, for ‘fewer distractions and better focus on the material taught.’ His farm currently boasts a number of clever designs, including borehole pump powered by a solar panel that tracks the sun as it moves across the sky, a solar thermal hot water heater, and a fish pond provided with a stream of water from a solar powered pump – his goal is to completely power his farm and house off the Zambian grid, which can prove to be finicky at times, to say the least.

As of 2006, only 19% of Zambians had electricity. 49% of the urban population was electrified, 3.2% of the rural areas were. In a country with as sparse a rural population, getting electricity to the far reaches of the country is a daunting, if not impossible task for the foreseeable future.

One interesting conversation the class continually came back to, was theft of the panels. Evidently solar panels go like hot cakes once installed. One of the larger cell network providers here had to abandon solar powered cell phone towers in remote areas altogether. Their first installations showed the lack of consideration for theft, with panels in easily accessible and maintainable locations near the bottom of the towers. The next revision included a raised installation surrounded by a fence and barbed wire. The last revision reverted to a generator with a refueling truck making rounds to ensure the generators never die.

Another story told of a rural clinic powered by solar energy. When the in-charge discovered the panels had been stolen, the clinic was promptly closed with the promise not to reopen until the panels were returned. The panels were back in place 2 days later, and the clinic was reopened. The difference between these two stories conveys the mentality and approach needed to be successful here. Community trumps technology. Anything can be stolen by one means or another – but it takes the strength and unity of everyone for mutual security. In order to get the backing of the community, however, your system has to benefit the community in tangible ways.

We are installing solar power in a number of clinics – but its only to power a data collection system. There are no additional lights, vaccine fridges, or any immediate visible benefits from our solar power installation. In the long term, there is a great potential for the data system to improve health outcomes – the goal of the project is to reduce under five mortality by 30% within 5 years. How can you instill long term appreciation in the local population now, however, when the immediate desire for television, radio or lights can easily usurp the good intentions of the installation?

My initial work in Mozambique was a sort of side project (that has turned into a more primary project for the time being) to work with a non-profit here on a large household survey in the province of Zambezia.

For those less global-health-minded folks out there, household surveys are the bread and butter of international health programming. We take it for granted in the States that we have functioning vital registration and disease surveillance systems that keep policymakers and program managers abreast of mortality rates, causes of death, and burden of disease. Such systems provide data to make informed decisions, and also give us baseline data from which we can later evaluate whether or not interventions have really worked. In sub-Saharan Africa, vital registration systems are virtually non-existent, and where they do exist, they are largely unreliable. Until health information systems are more firmly in place, we use household surveys as a measure to obtain this necessary data.

Household surveys are long, unwieldy, complicated, and require enormous logistical effort. Our survey has over 500 questions, ranging from general demographic inquiry to questions about HIV/AIDS or women’s empowerment. It will be administered to a random sample of over 4,000 households in Zambezia province by the end of July. To top it all off, we’re administering it not on paper, but on Androids with ODK Collect.

Data collection, in a sense, is one of the most natural applications of mobile tech to public health, but the world of international public health feels a bit distanced from and intimidated by what it considers the world of technology. I’m working here to bridge the two. In this case, working with a data collection application on the mobiles is easier for the survey enumerators (can you imagine carrying around a stack of 33-page surveys in rural Mozambique?). Using the mobiles is safer in terms of data security, because the women simply submit the data to a server when they’re in an area that has cell coverage. The electronic survey automates skip logic, which is a mental jungle gym on the paper version of the survey (i.e. we do away with having to think about “If yes and the interviewee has children, skip to question 5, if no and the subject has children, skip to question 6a”, etc.) Additionally, we eliminate transcription errors that can occur with a paper survey, because we skip the step where paper survey results are entered into a database for analysis. And it uses less paper!

Training is obviously of a lot of importance here. We’re working with a group of Mozambican women to be the survey enumerators, and it’s their commitment and interest that makes the job fun.

Making sure that the survey enumerators know how to use the technology is important to my supervisors, but making sure that the technology is useful and useable to these women is more important to me. I’ve always thought that the job that’s hardest to do is the one where you feel as if you’re not contributing to a greater whole. And as someone who’s done data collection before, I know that it can be tedious and frustrating at times—and I was never sent out into the bush on foot to do it. To me, this system seems easier, better, and faster, but those qualifications don’t mean anything unless the enumerators think so too. In fact, I told everyone up front that if at the end of the initial week of training they didn’t like the phones, we should scrap it and go pen-and-paper. Who am I to make this job harder?

But things have gone well. Especially rewarding is watching a survey team leader (who was trained before the larger body of general enumerators) explain to their team that it might be confusing at first, but that the phone is actually much simpler and will make their job easier. Moreover, training has given us a way to elicit commentary from the enumerators so that we can modify and adapt the survey on the phone according to their needs and wants.

Most unexpected–and I think the best–part of all of this is that the enumerators are really connecting with the act of submitting their data. Instead of turning in paper forms to their team leader, who will turn them into a supervisor, who will in turn them in to the office ad infinitum until the point where they’ll eventually be analyzed, the women gather with their team at the end of the day to select the forms to send to the server. They push the button saying that the data is complete and ready to be used. It’s a small, empowering action that is not lost on them.

At the end of training, we had a small party for the enumerators in the district of Alto Molocue. We asked if anyone wanted to say a few words before we cut the cake. Perhaps the highlight of my time in Mozambique so far was when one enumerator stood to explain her gratitude for her time spent learning. Not just because of the job–which she admitted she wanted and needed–but because of the work she felt she was doing for her children, and their children in the future.

It doesn’t get much better than that.