Defining the community & the challenge to address
Before jumping in and starting an energy project in a community, it is fundamental to understand the community and their needs as this forms the basis of what the project can deliver. To put it broadly, energy is a service which allows people to do work. Focusing on the people the energy is serving rather than its mode of delivery is fundamental to a successful project and the reverse is often why projects in developing communities fail. This is the first stage of the methodology, Project Definition.
This step consists of three stages:
Understanding a community is to understand a long list of factors including social, geographical, political, cultural and economic, among many others. It is especially important to gain this knowledge for developing communities as it may be a particular combination of these factors which have posed as barriers to community development in the first place.
This step will highlight the information required to define a community and their development goals, suggest a strategy in which to do this and discuss challenges which may arise during the process. A list of common technologies which can be used to meet the development goals are listed. Along with this list, common barriers to their implementation are presented which can be used to eliminate technologies from consideration and so reducing the project workload.
There can be many challenges with community definition including:
Remoteness: Where the remoteness of a community poses a challenge, remote data collection tools such as Kobo Toolbox can be used, as well as a study of relevant literature.
Communication: Significant challenges exist where different languages or dialects are used. This can lead to misinterpretation of questionnaires. An ethical assessment is recommended before questionnaire approval to avoid any unintended offence (which may result in the validity of the answers being questionable).
Capturing the diversity of a community: Unless every stakeholder in the community provides input to surveys, the nature of the entire community cannot be known. Hence rational judgement must be used to estimate conclusions when a representative amount of answers have been recorded.
Knowledge gaps of community members or in collected data: Not everything may be able to be collected by on-the-ground surveys. Knowledge gaps should be further researched with previous case studies or data in literature.
Identifying the development goals of the community is important to ensure that the project is providing something that is useful for the community. It should be led by the community and not the project team. Discussion should occur to bridge any knowledge gaps the community might have about energy development and the benefits it can bring (for example, individuals might not be aware of the benefits of electric lighting compared to kerosene), as outlined in the steps below.
Listed below are some examples of development needs that may be considered in discussions:
This is an extensive, but not exhaustive, list of issues to consider. Needs and prioritories will be highly personal depending on the community situation and must be determined through in-depth discussion.
Based upon the findings of the previous two steps, a list of potentially technically viable technologies should be created. These technologies will be investigated in more detail in subsequent steps of the methodology. Eliminating any technologies which are clearly not viable given the context of the village will prevent redundant findings or time wasting. It is also useful at this step to divide the energy system into two components: electrical and thermal. Following this, the defined development goals should be categorised into these two components (with overlap if appropriate).
Some typical technologies used in energy for development are listed below, along with potential barriers to viability.
To see the project definition for the case study in Pangboche click here
The next step of the methodology is Data Collection