Congo nun overcomes blackouts with homemade hydroelectric plant
Sister Alphonsine Ciza spends most of her day in gum boots, white veil tucked under a builder's hat, manning the micro hydroelectric plant she built to overcome daily electricity cuts in her town of Miti in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
She works around the clock with a team of nuns and engineers, greasing machinery and checking the dials of a generator that is fed from a nearby reservoir and lights up a convent, church, two schools and a clinic free of charge.
Without the plant, residents would only have electricity two or three days a week for a few hours.
"We sisters... cannot function this way because we have to provide a lot of services," said Ciza, 55, a portable voltage meter slung around her neck in the town of about 300,000 inhabitants near the border with Rwanda.
Blackouts are a daily disruption in the Congo, a vast central African country of around 90 million people that sources most of its electricity from a run-down and mismanaged hydropower system.
The government has worked with foreign partners in an effort to increase the capacity of the mineral-rich nation's ailing grid. Critics say the new projects focus too much on powering mines and exporting electricity to neighbouring countries.
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Congolese nun and electrical engineer Alfonsine Ciza attends to the general circuit breaker at her micro hydropower plant that provides electricity to a convent, schools and a health centre in Miti near Bukavu South Kivu in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo April 12, 2022. REUTERS/Djaffar Sabiti
Despite millions of dollars in donor funding, only around 20% of the population has access to electricity, according to the World Bank.
Fed up with relying on candlelight and costly fuel-powered generators, Ciza started raising money in 2015 to build the hydropower plant.
She picked up skills as a young nun, repairing electrical faults around the convent, which convinced superiors to send her to study mechanical engineering.
It took Ciza's convent three years to gather the required $297,000 and build the plant, which generates between 0.05 and 0.1 MW. Read More...
