Why a foundation about energy, when the need is education, water and income?
Because energy is what the others run on. A clinic without power cannot keep a vaccine cold. A school without light closes when the sun goes down, which in West Africa is around six o’clock all year. A workshop without power stays a hand trade, and a hand trade rarely pays a wage. Water is pumped. Grain is milled. Phones — which are how a grower learns a price and a family transfers money — are charged.
Treat energy as a sector and it looks like infrastructure. Treat it as a lever, and it becomes the shortest path to almost everything else we care about.
Three things we hold to
Start where the waste already is
The most durable projects use something a place already has and does not value. Bondoukou has cashew shells by the tonne and a disposal problem attached to them. That is a better starting point than importing a solution designed elsewhere.
Small, measured, and published
We would rather run one unit and report honestly on what it yields than announce a programme across five regions. When results disappoint, we intend to say so — a foundation that only publishes its successes is telling you very little.
Local hands, or it does not last
Equipment that only a visiting technician can repair stops working the month after the visit ends. Training is not the soft part of the project; it is the part that decides whether anything remains in three years.
