Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The impacts of a strengthening El Niño and the war in Iran highlight in the Greater Horn of Africa, an area already beset by prolonged crisis and conflict, factors that are combining with others to potentially create a major, multicountry polycrisis.
The framework of our civilization is premised on the destruction of the planet.
This is what happens when a community comes together, no matter what challenges they may face…a living example of the ubuntu philosophy: I am because you are.
Africa is at a crossroads in how its constituent countries develop and build their economies. What happens next isn’t just about the future of carbon emissions, but the future of African communities.
In 2021, 81% of Kenya’s electricity generation came from the low carbon sources of geothermal, hydro, wind, and solar power.
The Ubuntu philosophy is: I am because you are. We have already been seeing the importance of the quality of relations threading itself through the story of Ubuntu.Lab from day one.
This is a story about those people of the Congolese forests, about how their unique way of life is threatened by the very people who should be defending them and how rainforests actually thrive when humans adapt to a different way of life.
After commencing only in 2015, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP) in Kenya has rapidly become the largest such initiative in Africa, and Kenya’s single largest investment in the country’s history. It began generating electricity in 2018 and was fully inaugurated in 2019. For that reason, its lessons are being scrutinised for the technology’s wider regional potential.
In Africa, unlike the weather here, it’s always nice and bright, there is lots of sun available all year round, so we can use the solar energy. What we’ve also devised is a hybrid system, which also uses wind energy. So what happens in Africa – or anywhere – is the winds are often there when it’s raining. When there’s no solar, the wind power kicks in.
I invite you to see with new eyes. Ultimately Guha’s definition of environmentalism is not wrong. It just doesn’t fit mine and many others’ reality of what environmentalism is: holistic; long rooted in time and space; for something and not only against; alive and based in the land, lives, work and bodies of those around me, African in and of their environments.
Africa has within its reach a future that creates a homegrown, robust, clean energy economy that keeps jobs and money on the continent.
It has long been my contention that one of the chief symptoms of the age of constraints we have now entered would be the decline of public health systems globally.
