Day 19 – Meet with REA and Fontes

Last day of this my first africa trip…

Said goodbye to the very friendly persons at Manhattan Gesthouse.

First meeting of today was with Mr. Godfrey R. Turyahikayo, Executive Director of the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) of Uganda. As for yesterday, Henry accompanied me. REA is part of Minestry of Energy and Mineral Developmet and has a very important role in implementing the National Development Plan, where accelerated rural electrification is one key objective.

We had a very fruitful Meeting, where we first presented the NREEG and Mr. Turyahikayo then explained the main mechanisms for stimulating rural renewable energy development, including infrastructure, remote energy supplies (feed in tarrifs) and small scale PV systems (credit and subsidies).

Had lunch with Lucrezia Koestler at Fontes. Read more about the water and sanitation projects of Fontes at their web. Learned a lot during that lunch-hour! Main takeaways:

• Building something is ‘easy’ (just engineering). Making it last for years is more difficult (human element comes in)
• Training and follow-up, i.e. key to success

Spent the afternoon/evening to catch up adm. and to update the blog.

I just realized that the plane leaves 05.30 in the morning and not just after midnight, as I for some reason had told myself. It is going to be a long day/night…

Well, here I am at the airport and there is a free WiFi. Positive surprise!