A solar minigrid in a Goma neighborhood where almost everyone lacked access to electricity just five years ago is offering a flicker of hope despite widespread poverty and the city’s violent takeover by Congolese rebels early this year.
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GOMA, Congo — Street lights erase the shadows where attackers once hid. Noisy, polluting diesel generators have gone silent. New businesses are taking root.
In several Goma neighborhoods where almost nobody had electricity just five years ago, a small solar network is offering a flicker of hope despite widespread poverty and the city’s violent takeover by Congolese rebels early this year.
Advocates believe it’s a model that can be successful throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond to electrify places where conflict and poverty have left people behind, using renewable energy to benefit those most vulnerable to climate change.
“I remember the first night that we turned on the public street lighting, just spontaneous celebrations in the streets, just people coming out of their homes, singing and dancing with our team,” said Jonathan Shaw, chief executive officer of Nuru, the utility he helped start. “Just seeing what this meant to people … the sense of their dignity and value that somebody was willing to come and invest in their lives and their communities and their homes (is) so, so moving.”
That was in 2020, three years after Shaw, a former teacher, and Congolese partner Archip Lobo Ngumba built the DRC’s first commercial solar minigrid in the small town of Beni in Congo’s North Kivu province. Provincial officials then asked them to consider Goma, near the Rwandan border, where only a small fraction of the population had access to electricity — usually from diesel-powered generators, Shaw said.
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