As Ethiopiaid works to support our partners through the climate crisis, we are exploring solar power and renewable energy. Discover more in this series of guest blogs written by Ethiopiaid donor and energy expert Andrew AJ Walker.
In part 1 of this 3-part series, read how Hope Enterprises’ school in Asosa shows what energy certainty actually means — and the cost of managing without.
The power to deliver
At Hope Enterprises’ school in Asosa, energy isn’t something you switch on and forget about. It’s something you plan around. Work around. Sometimes go without.
Electricity might come back in an hour. Or later that day. Or not at all.
So food can’t always be stored safely. Lessons don’t always run as planned. Devices can’t be relied on. Even boiling water becomes something that needs thinking through.
These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re small interruptions, repeated every day, shaping what’s possible.
It’s only when you spend time somewhere like this that you realise how much of modern life depends on one assumption:
That energy will be there when you need it.
Here, that assumption doesn’t hold.
And once you see it, the question shifts.
It’s no longer about cost, or efficiency, or even sustainability.
It’s about certainty.
Because when electricity isn’t reliable, everything finds a workaround. Cooking moves back to firewood. Around four tonnes a month, gathered or purchased, carried in and burned in enclosed spaces. Smoke that sits in the air. Time that disappears into managing something that should have been solved already. None of it stops the school functioning. But it changes how it functions.
Energy becomes something that has to be worked around.
The same pattern appears elsewhere.
Food can’t just be prepared, it has to be planned around what’s possible that day. Water systems depend on pumps that may or may not run. Growing food becomes a risk if irrigation can’t be relied on.
So decisions shrink to what feels safe.
Not what’s best. Not what’s possible. Just what might work.
That’s what unreliable energy really does. It lowers the ceiling.
And it does it quietly.
When solar arrives, what changes isn’t just the power supply.
It’s the removal of those workarounds.
At the school in Asosa, solar and battery storage didn’t just replace an unreliable grid. It replaced the need to think about whether energy would be there at all. Cooking no longer depends on firewood in the same way. Time shifts back to teaching and running the school. Air quality improves. The surrounding pressure on local wood supply begins to ease.
Water systems become predictable. Irrigation can run on a schedule, not on hope. Food production becomes something the school can plan around, not gamble on.
And once that certainty is in place, behaviour changes.
You invest differently. You plan further ahead. You build systems that assume things will work.
The technology matters. But not in the way you might expect.
Solar, in this context, isn’t a sustainability add-on. It’s not a marginal improvement.
It’s the system.
In places where the grid is intermittent or absent, solar with battery storage offers something more valuable than connection: predictability. No fuel to source. No price volatility. No daily question of whether power will be available.
Just something that works.
What the school in Asosa shows isn’t a one-off success.
It’s a pattern.
When energy becomes reliable, everything built on top of it changes. A kitchen becomes safer. A water system becomes usable. A school becomes something more than a place that copes.
It becomes something that can plan.
And that is what energy really provides.
Not just power.
But the ability to move forward without hesitation.
The Power to Deliver?
Hope Enterprises’ school in Asosa shows what energy certainty actually means — and the cost of managing without.
With the conflict in the Middle East there’s a greater focus in the UK on the cost of running our homes, cars and workplaces. But what would your home be like if energy were not simply expensive but intermittent or non-existent? The building might function. But anything that requires electricity simply isn’t available. Maybe you have enough battery in your phone or laptop to carry on a little longer, but you’d be unable to access the internet, and food storage would become a concern long before you missed your morning tea.
How long before any organisation stops functioning? How long before patients go untreated, or children stop learning?
For most of us this is something we recall from a storm, a temporary power cut, or some off-grid experience we embraced as “character-building”. For the staff at Hope Enterprises’ school in Asosa, in the far west of Ethiopia, close to the South Sudan border, electricity was more commonly absent than present. Planning around its non-existence was simply the sensible tactic.
That changed when solar arrived, funded by a project co-ordinated by Power2Africa through Amber Energy. And what changed with it tells you something important about what energy actually is, not a flow of electrons, not a utility, not a cost item, but the catalyst for almost everything else a community tries to do.
Asosa sits roughly 650 kilometres west of Addis Ababa, in one of Ethiopia’s most remote and underdeveloped regions. The national grid exists in theory; in practice, supply is intermittent, unreliable, and in some areas simply absent.
Hope Enterprises is an Ethiopian NGO with a long track record of delivering education and community development programmes, particularly in underserved areas like this. Their school in Asosa is not a temporary structure or a pilot project — it is a real institution, a beacon for its community, with the full complexity that entails: food to prepare, a water supply to manage, teaching to deliver, and a community that depends on it to function day in, day out. For many of the families, the school is not supplementing nutrition. It is providing it.
Solar energy here is not a supplement to an existing system. It is the system. And what it enables is worth examining carefully, because it challenges some comfortable assumptions about what “energy access” actually means.
The firewood question
Before the solar project, the school’s cooking relied on firewood — around four tonnes per month, either collected or purchased, brought to the school and burned in enclosed spaces, day after day, producing smoke that the people preparing food breathe continuously.
Across Ethiopia, wood fuel accounts for around 90% of total energy consumption, and the pressure this places on already stressed forest cover is severe. Deforestation is a visible, ongoing process with direct consequences for soil quality, water retention, and the livelihoods of communities in affected areas.
When solar electricity enables electric cooking — even partially — the impact ripples outwards. Less wood means less local deforestation, with downstream benefits to soil quality and flood mitigation. Less burning means better air quality in the kitchen and surrounding spaces. Less time spent sourcing and managing fuel means staff time redirected towards what they’re actually there to do. An energy intervention that looks, from a distance, like a single change arrives at the community as something far more compound.
Would you accept that your catering staff spent a meaningful part of their working week managing fuel supply for the ovens? Or that the air quality in the kitchen was a recognised health risk? The answer, in a UK context, is obviously not. In Asosa, before solar, that was simply the accepted cost of feeding children.
From irrigation to food security
Solar power at the school has also enabled an effective irrigation system for growing food for students. This illustrates something that purely financial analyses of energy access tend to miss: certainty changes behaviour. When you have reliable electricity, you plan differently. You invest in systems that depend on consistency.
You run an irrigation schedule. You plant crops that require it. You shift from mitigation, managing the days when there is no power, to planning for a school that simply works.
Before reliable power, investing in an irrigation-dependent growing system makes no sense — you cannot trust the pump will run when you need it. The alternative is a petrol-powered pump: expensive, noisy, dependent on fuel supply, and subject to exactly the same cost volatility pressures driving fuel poverty in the first place.
After solar, that maths changes entirely. The pump runs. The timetable holds. The food grows. And children who might otherwise have been fed less — or not at all — eat better.
This is the difference between capacity and capability. Having the capability to do something is not the same as having the capacity to plan around it. Solar didn’t just give the school electricity. It gave the school the ability to make longer-term decisions with confidence.
Clinics, cold chains and the cost of a power cut
The pattern repeats across health facilities. Nationally, only around a third of health clinics in Ethiopia have reliable access to electricity. An EU-funded programme upgraded over 100 health facilities — and the consequences of that intervention are significant.
If your GP practice lost refrigeration for 24 hours, what would happen to its vaccine stock? It would likely be unsafe to use, a significant disruption, but one softened by the fact that a restocked distribution centre is a phone call away. Now consider running a rural clinic where that scenario is not a one-off emergency but a recurring feature of normal operations, where vaccines for measles, polio and tetanus may simply be ineffective by morning.
Solar changes that. Clinics can maintain cold chains. They can perform night-time deliveries safely. They can run emergency care after dark. These are not incremental improvements — they are the difference between a functioning healthcare facility and one effectively limited to daytime, good-weather operations.
Light, computers and a higher ceiling
The quietest benefit of solar power in schools is also the hardest to quantify. Lighting after dark has measurable effects on learning outcomes — people study longer, prepare better, achieve more. But the more consequential shift is what reliable power makes structurally possible.
When a school has reliable power, it can run computers. It can host connectivity. It can give children access to a broader curriculum and digital resources that were previously simply unavailable. Digital literacy is the entry ticket to economically meaningful participation in the modern world.
A child in Asosa who has never used a computer by the time they leave school is not starting from a level playing field. It is a disadvantage they will likely spend a lifetime trying to close.
Why not the grid?
The obvious question is why solar specifically, rather than simply connecting these communities to the national grid. The answer is that the grid, where it reaches rural Ethiopia at all, is frequently unreliable — subject to outages, voltage fluctuations, and gaps that make it unsuitable for the consistent, plan-around-it supply that institutions need. In the most remote areas, grid connection is not economically viable in any near-term timeframe.
Off-grid solar with battery storage offers something the grid currently cannot: predictability. Once installed, a well-designed system removes the question of “will there be power today?” from the daily operational calculus. The marginal cost of electricity from a solar installation is effectively zero — no fuel to procure, no supply chain to manage, no price volatility to absorb.
In a country where fuel costs represent a disproportionately large share of institutional operating budgets, that financial stability matters as much as the physical supply.
And Ethiopia’s solar resource is exceptional. The same panel that struggles through a British winter produces roughly three times the annual electricity output when installed in rural Ethiopia. The economics of the technology look very different when the sun shows up reliably — a point we explore in depth in the next article in this series.
What Asosa shows us
The Hope Enterprises school in Asosa is not an anomaly or a showpiece. It is one example of a pattern playing out across rural Ethiopia: communities that have been denied reliable energy access finding in solar not just a power source but a platform.
A platform from which to build a functioning kitchen, a cold chain, a computing lab, an irrigation system, a school that works the way a school is supposed to work.
Solar is changing that calculation, one installation at a time. The question is not whether this technology works — it demonstrably does. Good quality solar panels carry a 25-year lifespan and allow the leaders of these projects to focus on changing lives, rather than sourcing energy.
The question is whether the investment, the financing models and the political will exist to deploy it at the scale the need demands.
About: AJ Walker is Strategy Director at Block One Group, advising on complex energy systems and renewable energy strategies in the UK and Europe. He led the Net Zero Consultancy team at Amber and championed the fundraising for the Hope Enterprises project in Asosa.
Read more
Mitigating the impact of climate change
We have been working with our Ethiopian partners for over a decade on a variety of climate change mitigation projects. Find out more.
Latest News
Read our latest news, impact stories and updates from our partners and the people you are supporting.
