New Report: Solar Water Pump Customers Report Improvements in Their Lives
The Uses & Impacts of Solar Water Pumps Report explores the benefits and challenges experienced by customers in East Africa, Senegal and Zambia based on findings by the 60 Decibels team. It provides insights to inform stakeholders and encourage scaling of markets for nascent technologies like solar water pumps.
Our latest report, Uses and Impacts of Solar Water Pumps, published in collaboration with 60 Decibels, provides compelling evidence on SWPs’ contribution to economic growth and improved livelihoods. The top two applications of SWPs being agriculture and irrigation- with 87% of the customers interviewed stating an improvement in their farming methods.
We published the first iteration of this report in May 2019. Since then, we followed up with most of the initial 375 respondents and contacted an additional 818 customers in Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia through baseline and follow up interviews. This latest analysis examines the differences between the data collected before 2020 for the first report and the data collected since January 2020 to provide more insight into any changes.
Despite the positive outcomes on farmer’s livelihoods and increased agricultural production, we also uncovered challenges experienced by the customers. These challenges include faulty technology, mismatched expectations and misuse of the pump. To achieve the valuable potential of SWPs as energy-efficient, productive-use appliances, the challenges must be addressed.
Read the full report here.