Social enterprise lights villages with skills

Outside the cluster of mud-walled houses, in the pitch darkness, two dogs play. Apart from their occasional yelp, the night is deathly quiet. Beyond the fence, made up of haphazardly crisscrossed sticks, there could be elephants or even lions. In this village of Nthunguni, in Mtito Andei, animals roam freely at night.

The 22-year-old Juma Kilumo appears from one of the houses, torch in mouth, a new tablet and bulbs in hand.

He strides over to a simple gazebo outside his mother's kitchen, hangs the bulb on the gazebo's rafters and, with a minute remote controller in hand, switches on the device in hand, a solar-powered tablet called Solar Media.

It is a new device that earlier in the day was presented to him by Mama Layla Solar Lights, a Nairobi-based social enterprise responsible for uploading content in the device, in collaboration with Shenzen Solarun Energy Company Ltd.

Kenswed Organisation, a non-profit organisation aimed at poverty eradication, through Kenswed Vocational Training Centre (KVTC), identified students in need of and procured the devices.

Electronic tablets

Tonight, in this remote village which is not connected to the national power grid, 20 homes have new electronic tablets, three power LED bulbs and a solar panel each. Shared among 54 beneficiaries, the tablets, christened Solar Media, were developed by Chinese entrepreneur Susan Li Xia who, during the Covid-19.

He sought a solution for children in remote areas where access to online learning materials, and power, was a challenge. The device is preloaded with information on agriculture, health, skills development, entertainment, and religious and civic education, among others. Users obtain full courses on technical skills, with the information updated every three months.

Months later, Mr Kilumo and his peers will be tested on the skills they have learnt off this device.

A partnership with Mama Layla, which runs women and youth empowerment centre, and houses a primary school in partnership with Shelter Children's Home, in Kibiku, Ngong, gave Li access to Kenyan communities in need of her Solar Media solution. It helped that Mama Layla, run by Hanif Ahmed Poona and founded by Roshan Ahmed, Mr Poona's sister, who has since passed away, was already making and distributing solar lights to help communities in the last mile.

At the 20-acre farm in Kibiku, Ngong, on which Shelter Children's Home sits, 10 acres are under cultivation. Here, they grow onions, kale, spinach, bananas and maize. They also keep bees. Proceeds from the sale of these crops are used to support the upkeep of the 150 children in the home.

Managers of different sections of the farm have, since 2022 been using Solar Media to hone their skills in crop management. Jamleck Mutuiri, who is in charge of beekeeping, says he has learnt a lot since he started using the gadget.

"I have more knowledge in disease control, pest prevention, cooperation with bees and even their feeding. I now even use lemon oil to treat beehives," he says. From the 91 beehives, he could harvest between 100 and 150 kilos of honey every three months in the rainy season.

The onion harvest also gives up to 5,000 kilos every season, with the manager equally upbeat that lessons he has learnt on Solar Media have helped improve yields.

Further up the farm, in a bakery, Josphat Mureithi, an amateur baker, can now make scones he could not two years ago, some of which are given to the children at home while the rest are sold. The lessons for all these are uploaded on the device.

With a solar panel provided, people living in villages without power, and with no internet connectivity, can now use Solar Media for skill development and for general learning without a hitch.

"We have been making solar lights to empower women in these areas, and now we have gone one step further with this partnership that gives us this device - which is the first of its kind," says Hanif, the CEO of Mama Layla.

Small-scale farmers without the requisite skills and information to make the most out of their agricultural activities are prime targets, alongside a legion of jobless youth in increasingly desperate situations around the country. The device, which curates information from various sources to provide comprehensive, accurate, and reliable content for users, also contains Bible and the Quran, says Hanif.

He is seeking partnerships so that more content is uploaded for users in the last mile. KVTC Principal Kelvin Lillan, says that in the Mtito Andei case, where Kenswed identified the need and called out for interested students to come out and be presented with the gadgets, the reception was overwhelming.

"We only bought 20 devices which we are distributing today and look, there are 54 students here. So they have to be paired up and then we can see how much they are able to learn from there," he says.

This is a pilot test, and through the students' experiences in its maiden stages, partners will see the adjustments they need to make to the device to improve its usability. With the distance from our Kenswed Institute in Ngong to these students already a challenge, Kenswed will negotiate a partnership that helps them visit them regularly.

Every three months, as content on the device, is updated and more uploaded, usage will also be analysed so needs can be better tailored to what the users seem most interested in, and an assessment will be done so that those who have bettered their skills can have proof of excellence and can secure jobs at the end of the course.

Entrepreneurial venture

Students also take a course in entrepreneurship so that they can know how to monetise their new skills.

Mr Hanif says that partnerships with organisations such as banks will enable the organisations to reach people in the last mile so that when they have finished a course and would want to start an entrepreneurial venture, they can know how to go about accessing credit.

The idea of Solar Media, Ms Li says, was born out of the need to make it simple and tenable for people in underdeveloped areas to learn by themselves and understand, and make use of the skill learnt.

"We have to do it the easiest way, and mostly in video, which beats audio, picture and text in communication," she says. "We have used cartoons also, a lot - this makes it easier to understand, and to remember."

She has been in solar business in Africa for 13 years, but it was not until during the pandemic that she thought of advancing methods of learning for children in rural areas occurred.

The pilot project in Kenya is the first public reveal, with a plan to roll out the first 1,000 units in the near future. "In the next three years, we hope to distribute Solar Media to 50,000 households, which will be empowered to boost their income and improve their standards of living. Esther Wavinya, a hairdresser, now wants to use the lessons provided in the device on hairdressing to fine-tune her business.

So do her colleagues Ruth Gerald and Pauline Kala, all three who share one Solar Media device. And although they have smartphones, poor internet connection, lack of charging solutions and high cost of internet make them unable to optimise them for skill development.