̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Centre for Sustainable Development

'Extreme sleepover #15' – keeping the lights on in rural Uganda

lw355 — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 16:28:50 +0000

“If I have a flush toilet in my house I think I can be a king of all kings because I can’t go out on those squatting latrines… also it can protect my wife from going outside alone as recently my wife was almost raped by a thug when she escorted my son to the latrine at around 10:30pm in the night.”

This is Paul. His declaration of the possession he would most value is met with laughter from his fellow villagers, but it highlights a very real concern – the safety of his family.

It’s also a valuable research finding for me. Too often, projects that bring electricity to villages like Paul’s fail because of lack of uptake and maintenance by the rural communities. But if, for instance, the benefits of electrification could be understood in terms of the safety value of night-time lighting, this could improve the sense of community responsibility towards sustaining the technology after its implementers have gone home.

Another villager, Michael, explains that he places most value in owning a corrugated iron sheet instead of grass-thatched roofing because this would reduce the risk of indoor fires. Here too, the value of electricity can be highlighted – it would avoid the need to cook on an open fire.

Understanding the locals’ real needs and desires can be a key element in overcoming the lack of technology uptake. Finding out what these are is the aim of my PhD research, working with Dr Heather Cruickshank at the Centre for Sustainable Development. While the technology itself has been extensively studied, social attributes in project design have received little attention.

I have travelled here by a ‘boda boda’ motorbike and then night bus, sharing my seat on the 12-hour journey on unpaved roads to the West Nile Region of Uganda with two too many people, a goat lying beneath me, and enough chickens not to be able to ignore the smell. Only once I am on the bus do I realise that my local research assistant has accidentally booked us on the budget bus (only US$2 cheaper than the luxury coach).

To provide better infrastructure services to rural communities, it is fundamentally important to relate to the beneficiaries’ needs and aspirations, and I need to travel to the areas to learn this at first hand. Infrastructure failure after the projects are handed over to the communities is common across the basic utility provisions such as water and electrification, and I am keen to discover if there is a way of improving project longevity by ‘selling’ a service that is valued.

Seven villages and three days of focus group discussions per village seem like an achievable task in the two months scheduled. Today is the first day of fieldwork and we have arrived at the village of Moyo for the day’s focus group discussions.

̽��ֱ��village is still very familiar to me; not much has changed since my last visit three years ago when I was working with the German Development Agency, GIZ, on the installation of the community-operated pico-hydropower scheme. These schemes are perfect for small communities with about 50 homes that require only enough electricity to power a few light bulbs and a small number of electrical items.

In Moyo, however, the scheme no longer works, and the villagers are once more plunged into darkness while a more effective solution is being explored.

We meet one of the women to mobilise the six chosen villagers. We decide to start with the men, as by late morning some of the men in the village will be drunk.

Identifying what is important to rural villagers when implementing basic infrastructure projects is far more complex than simply asking “what is important to you?” I have made a ‘value game’ and explain to the locals that they must choose, initially individually, 20 items from a list of approximately 50 items that include cow, hoe, fridge, water pot, bed and utensils. Following prioritisation, they will be asked to give reasons as to why these items are important to them.

Another example arises during the discussion. ̽��ֱ��villagers use kerosene lamps to light their homes. Simply offering a solution that replaces light from one source with another is not enough. Modern technologies can offer benefits that are indirectly linked to aspects perceived as ‘very important’ in rural communities – in this case, avoiding the use of fume-producing kerosene would resonate with the mothers’ hopes of keeping their children healthy.

̽��ֱ��findings from my research will be fed back to project implementers. My hope is that only small adjustments in the project design will be required in order to communicate these ‘additional’ benefits to the target users, and that the lights will be turned on and kept on in rural villages like Moyo.

Stephanie Hirmer is a PhD student in the Department of Engineering. She is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Qualcomm and the Smuts Memorial Fund.

Inset image – credit: Stephanie Hirmer.

Stephanie Hirmer travelled to Moyo in northern Uganda to ask which possessions the villagers most value and why. ̽��ֱ��results will be used to help reduce the failure rate of projects that bring electricity to rural communities.

Identifying what is important to rural villagers when implementing basic infrastructure projects is far more complex than simply asking “what is important to you?”

Stephanie Hirmer

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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When building for the future means what it says

sj387 — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 09:13:47 +0000

When the Victorian domestic housing boom kicked off in the 19th century, the designers, developers and inhabitants of the new terraces that sprung up across the country would probably have paid scant attention to the impact of housing on the environment over the long-term. Today, with approximately 40% of the nation’s buildings built before 1944, the UK has one of the oldest and least efficient domestic stocks in Europe, accounting for around 25% of its carbon emissions.

But, with new buildings, a very different scenario is fast approaching. According to government proposals, by 2016 all new homes will have to achieve a zero-carbon status. Buildings of the future should be low-energy, sustainable and able to respond to future changes – climatic, technological, social or regulatory – in other words, be ‘future proofed’.

This represents a significant shift for the building and construction sectors, as engineer Maria-Christina Georgiadou explained: “Much of the industry is based on a philosophy of ‘build-it-now and fix-it-later’ rather than on one of anticipating future trends and drivers affecting the energy performance of buildings.

“Added to this, there is conceptual confusion on what is ‘future-proofing’ in policy making, industry and academia. Little research has been carried out on identifying design approaches that adopt a long-term perspective in the context of the energy design of housing developments.”

For the past three years, Georgiadou has been working in the Centre for Sustainable Development, part of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, with Dr Theo Hacking and Professor Peter Guthrie to examine the design approaches available to building professionals for integrating future-proofing into the energy design of housing developments.

Although a portfolio of methods is available, Georgiadou concludes that many “underestimate or even overlook the social and economic aspects of sustainability”, and identifies a need for design strategies that will proactively manage future trends and drivers affecting the energy performance of buildings. Her aim is to propose unified guidelines.

Georgiadou has been following four ‘best-practice’ housing developments in the UK and Sweden – North West Cambridge (Cambridgeshire), West Carclaze and Baal (Cornwall), Välle Broar (Växjö) and Hammarby Sjöstad (Stockholm) – interviewing city officers, planners, developers, contractors and members of design teams involved in the energy design process.

“There was a clear difference in the approach taken in Sweden and the UK to sustainability, in general, and future-proofing, in particular,” she noted. “In Sweden the concept of ‘life cycle thinking’ emerged on the back of the 1970s oil crisis, when the municipalities sought to find alternatives to oil and switched to local wood waste, such as wood chips and sawdust. From this early on, they had environmental planning in mind, tending to construct in timber, which they have in abundance and is a sustainable material with potential for reuse and recycling at the end of the house’s life compared to concrete. Building professionals in Sweden are also familiar with Lifecycle Assessment tools used to assess the environmental impact of building solutions from ‘cradle to grave’.”

On the other hand, she finds that developments in the UK place greater emphasis on accommodating risks and uncertainties “so that the design can be resilient to the occurrence of high-impact events such as hotter summers due to climate change. ̽��ֱ��UK planning system and energy policy is focused on flexibility and adaptability, which cascades down into the design of buildings,” she added.

But which approach is best for thinking about the future of residential buildings? “ ̽��ֱ��best case is a combination of both,” said Georgiadou, whose research is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation in Greece.

“Buildings are already being designed and constructed to use less energy and reduce carbon emissions, but long-term future-proofing to climate change is still in its infancy,” she added. “My research has identified the lack of a robust evidence-based framework as to how buildings can be future-proofed in terms of the selection of energy-related design responses right from the earliest stages of the project’s lifespan.”

To encourage a long-term view of the sustainability of buildings, the UK government has adopted the Government Soft Landings (GSL) scheme, which will be mandatory by 2016. “With GSL, the designers and constructors are required to monitor the buildings once built, to increase operational efficiency and understanding of the actual energy performance,” she explained. “This is in addition to the Code for Sustainable Homes, which is the tool by which the carbon rating of all new buildings is being measured.”

For the UK, Georgiadou believes one aspect of the solution is to build assessment criteria that explicitly promote a futures perspective into the Code for Sustainable Homes: “ ̽��ֱ��highest Code level aims for ‘zero carbon’ dwellings. However, fieldwork in the two UK cases revealed that this target may be hampered by the failure to consider the full lifecycle of the selected materials, building components and energy systems.”

She has now created a ‘knowledge map’ that can be used in any decision-support context for the energy design of residential buildings, with the potential to be expanded to cover other building types (such as offices, commercial, retail) as well as integration with other areas including water and waste management.

Evidence also shows that the focus of new buildings was predominantly on energy-efficiency measures and mitigation of carbon emissions now – what Georgiadou refers to as the “low hanging fruit” – and not on the adoption of adaptation strategies to address the increasing frequency and severity of temperature extremes that may lead to overheating of homes in the future.

“It’s the ability to respond to upcoming changes that defines future-proofing,” said Georgiadou. “This must be at the heart of strengthening building codes and energy-related standards at the start of the energy design process if we are to increase the likelihood of dwellings remaining ‘fit for purpose’ under a set of plausible energy futures. This would be a shift away from the short-term mindset that still dominates design and construction practices.”

For more information, please contact the Centre for Sustainable Development.

Too little attention is being paid to the long-term sustainability of new buildings in a changing climate according to a new study that makes recommendations for ‘future-proofing’ best practice.

It’s the ability to respond to upcoming changes that defines future-proofing

Maria-Christina Georgiadou

Kevin Dooley

Crane

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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