Amui Djor Communal Housing Shared Grid-Tied Solar Project

By Elijah Osei-Yeboah, 1st year MDP student

The Communal Housing Project at Amui Djor. Photo: PD

In my first blog, I mentioned that I helped to implement development projects. This blog will focus on one of those projects ― the Amui Djor Communal Housing Shared Grid-Tied Solar Project. The housing component of the project was completed before I started my field placement. It was funded by foreign donors (governments of the UK, Sweden, and Norway; and Slums Dweller’s International). The housing component is a good model for pro-poor housing and I am happy I got to know this because there are not many of them.

The urban poor in Ghana often live in slums since they cannot afford decent accommodation and that was the case in this area prior to the project. They were under constant threats of eviction but PD, the leading implementing institution bought the land and set up a temporary accommodation for them. Then they built a 3 storey house for 31 households. Mortgages are very uncommon in Ghana and the few banks which provide them do so at astronomical interest rates. But the apartments were sold to the beneficiaries at below market rates and the payments were spread over 10 years. The money which will be recovered from the project will be used to scale it up.

Community Housing Project. Source: PD

Provision of solar energy was the other component and it was one of the major things I did during my placement. The solar energy was intended to be a secondary power source since power outages can be very frequent in Ghana. During my placement, power supply was fairly stable but in bad times, the power may be on for only 12 hours a day. Households lose a lot of frozen food and this makes life difficult particularly in this day and age where busy work schedules make frozen food very attractive. Businesses which are heavily dependent on electricity are forced to adopt one or more of these measures ‒ lay workers off, completely shut down, increase product or service prices ‒ in order to deal with the high production cost resulting from running expensive fuel-powered generators. For households, kids in school are unable to study or do their homework at night and diseases which are triggered by extremely hot temperatures increase in incidence. 

Amui Djor Solar Energy Project

My tasks included computing household energy consumption levels for managing energy consumption, creating accounts for managing power purchases, sensitizing the beneficiaries about the intended benefits of the project and its utilization, determining the conditions of works for the vendor, and setting up an office for the vendor.