Today, fewer than 8% of Rwandans are without electricity and even when the projected grid coverage reached 35% in 2010, there are many rural areas that the grid simply will not reach. Health centers are no exception.
Health centers without electricity face major challenges providing even the most basic health services: staff cannot refrigerate vaccines, drugs and lab samples, and incubators and baby warmers often go unused. Laboratory technicians struggle to complete diagnostic tests without adequate microscope light, and the accountants find it near impossible to use health center computers to adequately track community health insurance or budgets. Women who go into labor at night are attended by candlelight, kerosene lamp, or forced to make do in the dark.
In Ocotber 2010, RW installed a new solar system at Gituku Health Center with generous support from the San Francisco Foundation. Gituku Health Center is set in a rural region of Ngoma District and serves over 24,000 local residents. The health center has suffered from inadequate electricity and water supplies for years, and though the Government of Rwanda installed solar panels at the facility in 2009, the system simply did not have the capacity to meet the needs of the facility. Until this year, the solar panels had supplied a maximum of three hours of power each day, and the batteries had been recycled so many times that they had entirely lost their storage capacity.
The new solar panels at Gituku Health Center will provide the facility with 100% of its desired energy usage – enough to power lights through the night, six computers for tracking data collection and finance, laboratory equipment, infant incubators, and a refrigerator for essential vaccines.