Solar devices

I've had a week of not being able to post, and without much email contact either. But I'm well and happy and hoping to catch up. I won't post the pic of Simon in the rain till I've got more text on its way.

I've written before about the low take-up of solar panels, even in the many places where there is no grid to supply electricity. (Part of Rwanda's new 7 year plan is to connect 50% instead of the current 10%.) When I ask I'm told it is too expensive, and anyway it's only seen as a stopgap before the proper supply arrives. So what about other solar devices?

There's Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) with two campuses in Kigali, prominent in internet searches. After the usual preliminaries I visited on a week ago. The usual preliminaries comprised several earlier attempts to interest anybody in facilitating a visit for me and an eventual personal contact.

The contact is through Augustin, my host for this visit, but he's in South Africa representing the Evangelical Friends Church of Rwanda at a conference of African protestant churches. So he arranges for Antoine to take me. We phone ahead, phone again from the car park, ask a guard for directions and eventually find the person we are looking for. He turns out to be attached to a unit working on entrepreneurial opportunities for young people and knows nothing about the solar and other technologies to improve cooking, illustrated and described on the printouts I am carrying. He does, however, take us to the director.

The director is clearly not very interested in us, but perhaps etiquette demands that he accompany us round the workshops. He shows us iron or steel chambers of various sizes – smallest 30 litres – for institutional cooking, insulated with mud bricks, and a bread oven similarly constructed. He is visibly disappointed when neither Antoine nor I express any interest in buying. (They do provide school lunches in several of Antoine's schools, but he considers the price totally unrealistic.)

Do they have any examples of the solar cookers whose descriptions I show him? He summons somebody to bring one and opens it for me to photograph, saying that to be honest it doesn't work very well. OK, thank you, and what about the one I have here on my paper? Oh, he thinks the students dismantled it and haven't yet made copies.

He is able to show us some experimental designs for small fuel-efficient cookers, and a larger two-pan standing-height version with a flue, that can be fitted in a kitchen and beautified with tiles.

Although I've forgotten to bring the printed information, I ask about the 'fireless cooker' one of my students says she has seen here. It's a kind of haybox inside a basket, and promoted by Practical Action, among others. It's also known as the peacemaker. No, they don't have that. I suppose it may be on the other campus.

According to information from May 2010, the federal government of Rwanda has officially approved and recommended a design known as the rocket stove. It uses much less wood than traditional open three-stone fires or the small charcoal braziers. KIST doesn't have one. I'm still hunting for shops or market stalls selling such a thing, and haven't found anybody using one at home. So no solar cookers and not much in the way of newer, safer and cleaner ways of using conventional fuels either.

Alongside KIST, a solar bakery project in Ruhengeri is also described on the internet and mentioned on many sites. On Monday morning, with 4 days ahead of me, I start asking seriously whether anybody knows anything about it. One of the pastor's sons finds a video clip on the internet site and lo, they recognise one of the widows in whose interest True Vineyard Ministries are developing several projects. The widow provides the name of a pastor and eventually – on Wednesday afternoon – a phone number is found.

The researches have taken a long time, our day is running late because this morning's students were two and a half hours late (because their food handouts had arrived and had to be collected), rain is coming, and I'm afraid that in the end the weather will beat me. Solange and I catch a bus before the heaviest of the rain arrives, and she comes with me in a taxi to the rendezvous with a young worker, Simon, who speaks good English as well as French, we're told. We phone from the taxi, wait, phone again, wait some more, and Simon arrives. Solange goes back into town in the taxi to an appointment with a friend. Simon and I, under umbrellas, pick our way to the project.

Simon is polite and charming – a sociology graduate in his first paid job and a pastor's son. He has no idea why I'm here. I tell him I want to see the solar bakery. 'You can look at it, but it doesn't work.' We go into a yard where half a dozen women are carding and spinning sheep's wool on a reasonably dry verandah.

There is the oven, imported from the USA by the American woman who set up the project and visits from time to time. It's on a trolley, under a roof of banana leaves topped with a UNHCR tarpaulin. It can be wheeled out when the sun shines; it swivels and various shiny plates tilt. But this is the coolest and wettest part of the country, and it simply doesn't get hot enough for long enough. They haven't yet managed to move it to somewhere hotter and drier, in the south or east. So don't believe everything you read on the internet.