We are back in action in Uganda with Plan International and Plan Uganda! In 2018 we delivered two of our solar bakery and entrepreneurship trainings at Plan’s SmartUp Factory Hubs and now we’re back to do another nine installations and trainings! We have a bigger team and our ovens and Lytefire concentrators are better than ever.

We’re delivering these training sessions to two types of groups this time; SmartUp Hubs, which are youth training centers where underserved youth can come to learn life-skills and get training on a variety of subjects from tailoring to videography, and we’re also training ‘I-Decide’ groups which are typically women-led rural cooperative businesses that focus on empowering women economically so that they can decide for themselves how to run their lives and not depend on fathers, husbands, brothers or other men who might seek to control them.

During the training we cover three main areas: Lytefire Technical training so that participants have the knowledge to install, calibrate and maintain the equipment, bakery skills training where they learn hygiene, ingredients handling and the techniques to make a variety of delicious recipes, and entrepreneurship which includes everything they need to know to market their goods, do the accounting and manage their inventory.

Youth underemployment is a grave problem in Uganda, especially since the start of the pandemic but the great thing about baked goods is that they never go out of style. The fact that these young ‘solarpreneurs’ are using pure, direct solar energy to bake their products only adds to the excitement! Many of the areas where we’re training these youth have no local bakeries. Oftentimes the baked goods come from a town over an hour away, so this, in addition to using free, clean solar energy gives our young solarpreneurs a real advantage.

So far we’ve delivered 7 out of the 11 trainings that are planned. 9 are with fresh new groups and come with the latest and greatest Lytefires produced by our amazing team in Kisumu, Kenya, and the other 2 are ‘refresher’ trainings where we’ll revisit the Lytefires we installed in 2018 to train newcomers and conduct training according to the needs of the groups.

It has so far been a tremendous experience, meeting inspiring young people and adapting our trainings to the needs of each group. We’re recognizing that no two groups of young people from different areas are the same, and their needs differ greatly. Luckily, we have a really amazing team on the ground (if I do say so myself!). We have two training teams working at the same time, the first includes me (Lorin) as well as Augustine (who was one of the SmartUp youth we trained in 2018!) and Allen (a baking industry veteran who is based in Lira, Uganda) and they are training the I-Decide groups, scattered around Lira and the Northern Region, and the second team includes Callum, Hanna and Hasheem, who you might remember from our project last year in Tanzania at the Montessori School in Mwanza. Callum, Hanna and Hasheem are now rocking the SmartUp Hubs (if you’re not following us on Instagram @Lytefire_Solar, you’re missing out on some pretty incredible content!)

We are extremely grateful to Plan International and Plan Uganda for their support, and we’re proud to have a partner that is so dedicated to the well-being of young people. They’ve recognized that the Lytefire alongside the training we offer tick many many boxes: environmentally sustainable technology, healthy production of healthy products, socially just organization, empowerment for women and girls, cost effective business, and life skills not limited to hygiene, business administration, accounting and more! It’s not always easy when you assemble a bunch of young people together and put money on the table, but that’s the beauty of projects like this, we can facilitate life changing experiences and set youth on a course for a prosperous and sustainable future.

We’re looking forward to sharing success stories with you, and to working together with Plan to implement this program in more and more groups around the world.

More about the SmartUp Factory Program here.

Update from March 2022 - the project has been fully delivered and about 200 participants have been trained, resulting in the creation of 9 local solar bakeries. Read more in the posts.

Jambo mambo ! Habari ako ? Nzuri sana ! Greetings and salutations from Mwanza, Tanzania. Also known as Rock City, this city of about a million people is in the western part of the country and has about a million inhabitants. It is here that you can find Mwanza Montessori school, a wonderful institution devoted to wholesome and child focused education. The School is led by Sister Denise, who we connected with in Switzerland and enabled the installation of three Lytefire 5 solar ovens at their school to bake bread, cookies and cakes for the student population.

The school had an old unused shipping container that had been modified into a shop, with windows, doors, cupboards and shelves already built into it and during our pre-project survey we identified this as an ideal location for the ovens. Our Kenyan fabricator Jared traveled to Mwanza ahead of the project to scout out if there were suitable places for the Lytefires nearby to the container and then, due to uneven ground, he built 3 concrete ring foundations to host the ovens.

The installation of the machines was done collaboratively, with our team of project managers instructing teachers, students and school support staff how to install and calibrate the Lytefire5.

Next we headed into the classroom where we taught these lively youngsters about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. We covered such topics as procurement, inventory, hygiene, quality control, bookkeeping, profit margin calculations and how to develop a business plan. Below you can see our Kenyan country representative Joan Arwa, teaching the kids the difference in profit between buying retail and buying wholesale :

It’s our experience that young students are much more focused and well behaved if there are going to be cookies after school ;)

Montessori education consists of a lot of hands-on learning. ‘Teach me to do it by myself’ is a common saying amongst Montessori educators. That’s one of the reasons that our program fit so well with the Maria Montessori philosophy because we very much emphasize practical learning. We mix classroom sessions learning theory with the practical experience of creating tasty treats from scratch :

Cookies and cupcakes are great and get the students very excited but the primary reason for this initiative was to bake higher quality bread at a lower cost for the students. Previously, the school had been buying buns from a commercial bakery in town. Included in the price, as we learned in class there are fuel costs to bake, delivery fees and the profit margin of the business. Thanks to our intrepid team we found the cheapest places in town to buy all the ingredients and, without need to buy gas, electricity or charcoal to bake the bread, we managed to cut the schools’ bread budget nearly in half ! Feast your eyes on the delicious buns that our master baker Hasheem taught us all how to bake :

The final week involved some experimentation and optimisation of production flows and schedules, calculating recipes so that we match the size and weight of the commercial buns and also fill up the baking trays precisely, practicing the timing of starting the dough, heating up the Lytefire, letting the bread prove as we wash dishes, and then bake while reviewing the theory components. We’re extremely proud of the students and staff who took up this opportunity with enthusiasm. No project, however, is complete without a demo day !

We invited the families of participants, as well as some local dignitaries and other educators to come and see the results of our entrepreneurship and solar bakery training package. Of course we had to invite the students that didn’t have the chance to participate in the training as well and feed them lots of buns and cookies and the beautiful cakes you can see on the picture below ! The students and staff alike were excited to demonstrate their newly acquired skills and the power of the Lytefires and the crowd was happy to smell and taste cookies being baked solely by the power of the sun.

We at GoSol and the Mwanza Montessori school would like to thank Kloster Baldegg for making this project possible !

Thanks also to the team : Jared and Joan from Kenya, our new other project manager Sam Rodrigues, and Hanna Gregory and Callum McRobbie who were volunteering.

We’re happy to announce that we will be implementing an innovative new project in the Mwanza region of Tanzania in association with Montessori School Mwanza. Montessori School Mwanza is under the direction of Sister Denise Mattle, who has been involved in Montessori education for more than 40 years.

Montessori is a method of education that is based on self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play. It was developed by Maria Montessor in Italy about a century agoi and is practiced worldwide.

Given the fact that the Montessori School Mwanza is an education campus for more than 1000 students, some of whom stay overnight, there is a considerable demand for bread and baked goods as well as the occasional birthday cake already coming from within the institution! Beyond that, the goal is to sell the solar-baked goods through a newly opened shop in the neighborhood.

Together, GoSol and Montessori School Mwanza will install Lytefire 3 ovens, conduct a training of trainers to ensure that staff at the school are familiar with Lytefire tech as well as the basics of baking and entrepreneurship. Afterwards, together we’ll train the first batch of secondary school students who will have the opportunity to provide baked goods for their peers and also create a student run business that will develop recipes and sell baked goods to the surrounding population.

The hands-on learning approach of Montessori Schools is a great fit for GoSol’s educational program where we train participants in the installation, use and maintenance of Lytefire technology as well as practical aspects of entrepreneurship and bakery skills. Giving secondary school students the opportunity to also interact with a renewable energy source and learn about climate change can also help to prepare them for the future.

This is a great opportunity to give youth who are interested in learning about how to run a business a great hands-on experience as part of their schooling, supervised by caring and qualified adults. Additionally, for any students more interested in the culinary arts there should be ample opportunity to practice and experiment while baking for their friends and fellow students.

This initiative should help to save Montessori School Mwanza money, reduce their environmental impact and give a large number of young people exposure to renewable energy solutions, experience running a business and lots of practice baking delicious treats like cakes, cookies, muffins and more!

More info about Montessori Mwanza here.

Read more about the project once completed with 300 buns solar baked for the school !.

All pictures (c) Montessori Mwanza.

We’re very happy to announce the ladies of Goghin have gone solar!

Thanks to your generous contributions on the crowdfunding, the hard work of Vincent Nikiema and his association SOS Énergie Burkina and the contribution of L’Association pour un Monde Solidaire (ASW) we were able to deliver a great training package to members of this rural women’s group.

Over the course of about 3 weeks, our team in Burkina Faso delivered and installed a Lytefire6 along with all the equipment needed for a small bakery, and we conducted two training modules, one focusing on small scale entrepreneurship skills, and the other on practical baking skills.

For the entrepreneurship training, we had said that we could handle a class size of about 15. Nearly 30 women showed up! Only a handful of them could read and write, but all of them wanted to learn more about how to handle money and improve their business skills. Of course, we could not turn them away. Fortunately, our entrepreneurship educator, Somé Alexis has extensive experience training women of all education levels, and he brought an additional helper who is fluent in Mooré, the language of the Mossi people.

While the ladies were learning how to do book keeping, budgeting and other entrepreneurship skills, we worked with some men from the village to ensure they had the know-how to install and calibrate the mirrors on the Lytefire. A number of young men came and went, but in our experience young men move around too much so even if they are trained up, they might not be around when they are needed. We worked with Mr. Sédou and André Nikiema (Vincent’s brother) to install and calibrate the mirrors of the Lytefire. This was also a great chance to see our country manager Martin Poubidjie in action, teaching others how to calibrate.

For the practical bakery portion of the training package, Mr. Jean Bosco made his appearance again and he and his son Allain spent a week with the ladies teaching them the fundamentals of baking, from good ingredient storage habits, to hygiene, proper measuring technique, how to vary the amount of yeast depending on temperature (when it’s 42degC in the afternoon, you don’t need as much yeast as in the morning!) and, very importantly, good kneading technique.

Their village is about 15 minutes off the road from Ouagadougou to Bobo Diolasso about 45 minutes from the city. There is an industrial bakery in the nearby town of Tanghin Dassouri that makes only (in my opinion) cardboard tasting baguettes, but there are so many other delicious varieties of bread and treats to make and the ladies have been very excited to learn some tastier recipes.

Based on our experiences with Remar, we have increased the surface area of the Lytefire from 5 square meters to 6 because the quality of sunlight in Burkina Faso is relatively low due to all the atmospheric dust blown off the Sahara. While you might not see a rain cloud for 9 months of the year, the skies always have a slight-to-severe white haze. For those of you who know your Direct Normal Irradiation levels, Ouagadougou and the surrounds receive about 1500w/m2 annually. For such a sunny country that isn’t very high and it’s due to the intense dustiness. Increasing the power of the Lytefire by 20% compensates for this.

As part of our package we also included a gas powered baking oven for those months of the year when there is simply too much dust (Harmattan wind season) and for the rainy season (July-August). The cost of LPG gas is very high for village life and so we’re very much looking forward to the accounting data the ladies have agreed to share with us.

Here, Lorin poses with some very happy new bakers:

Congratulations to the Goghin Women’s group and to SOS Burkina Énergie for sustainably going solar with Lytefire!

Next up in our series of engagements with the amazing NGO Remar, I visited Haiti in order to install a baking oven on the roof of the orphanage that Remar is running in the Tabarre neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince.

The last time I was in Haiti was in 2014 to build our Lytefire4 in collaboration with Haiti Communitere. It was a quick visit, just long enough to reacquaint myself with my main man Mackenson, buy materials, build the concentrator, cook some delicious food with the help of Fabienne (watch her going solar here), and then get back to Canada. Unfortunately we had no one who, at the time, was able to manage the project long term.

Happily, this has now changed. I reached out to a young man I met while I was in Haiti in 2012 who left a lasting impression. Louino Robillard is a powerful young community organizer deeply involved in Cité Soleil, the roughest neighborhood in the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Right now he’s running the Konbit Bibliyotek Cité Soleil.

I reached out to Robi and asked him if he knew anyone who could help me get the project started in Haiti before I arrived in Nov. 2020. I told him this person needs to be good at communicating, well organized and if not already experienced with metal fabrication, at least experienced with working for NGO type projects. He gave me the contact info for one Makenson Merisca and after a 30min video call, I knew I had found my project manager in Haiti.

Makenson is a young family man, humble, quick to laugh and has worked a number of jobs that have prepared him to be our Solar Fire representative in Haiti. He’s worked with a number of my friends and colleagues and has been a licensed heavy truck driver for a number of years. He was filled with questions and already had in mind a number of potential clients. Mak is from Foret des Pins, some of the last forest in Haiti and he knows how important it is to preserve the trees for his children and Haiti’s future.

The Remar orphanage is taking care of about 20 young boys, providing a safe space for them to grow, learn and play. The orphanage is in a nice big sprawling house in Tabarre, not far from Doctors Without Borders. There are solar panels on the roof, clothes drying lines, friendly teachers, some very vocal dogs and a lovely young woman named Antonia who is one of the primary caregivers and who will be the resident baker-in-chief. The goal of the project is to enable them to bake bread and treats for the household and also bake bread, cookies and bonbon sirop (a local muffin like treat) for the neighbourhood and bring in a little extra money to the orphanage. No trees shading our Lytefire up there on the roof, but with tropical storms in mind we knew we would have to make a few structural changes to the Lytefire design in order to quickly and easily be able to lay it out flat and strap it down to avoid the worst of the wind.

Makenson dove right into finding all the materials needed to build the Lytefire5 and finding a workshop where we could build it. Luckily enough, one of his neighbors runs Haiti Energy Mixte, a renewable energy education and product sales company. Romane is a jovial Rhasta who grew up in Germany but who has been living in Haiti for most of his life. Trained as an engineer in Germany, he’s using his skills to teach about and install renewable energy systems in Haiti. He’s experienced with wind, photovoltaic and a wide variety of solar concentrators.

After my (much needed) 2 weeks rest / self isolation (I had, after all, traveled from Burkina Faso and spent 44 hours in planes, trains, airports and automobiles) we got to work. It brought me no end of joy that we managed to reconnect with Mackenson from my earlier visits to Haiti and Mackenson was our primary welder while we built the Lytefire5 for Remar.

Haiti is a challenging place to operate. The security situation is even worse than when I was there in 2012 with gang violence and kidnappings at all time highs. Luckily, Makenson knows his way around the streets and peeps, so, I think largely thanks to him, I never had any issues. I got a little apartment 10 minutes from the workshop, we bought all the materials and we got to work cutting, drilling, tapping and welding.

With a good project manager and workshop partner in place I took care to train Makenson (who despite not having much experience in the metal fab shop proved quite adept and eager to learn), Mackenson and Romane because the ideal outcome would be that they would be able to continue doing installations and delivering projects in my absence as the newest Solar Fire country office. It looks like this will become a reality thanks to Makenson’s ambition and network… keep your fingers crossed!

After a more than a few generator breakdowns and tool problems, we finished a beautiful Lytefire5!

Romane was especially interested in the operation of it since he had trained on a variety of other solar concentrators which he confided to me were extremely complex *coughschefflercough* and not particularly well adapted to developing world context.

We ran a quick hands on technological training session on how to install or replace mirrors and how to calibrate the focal point. I was extremely happy with the speed at which Remar’s staff were able to pick up the needed skills (especially Antonia!) and I barely had to instruct Makenson or Romane at all... they both picked up focal point calibration like they were born to do it.

As luck would have it, my baker friend Fabienne, who you might remember baked some pretty epic pineapple upside-down cake on the L4 back in 2014 was available to train Remar people in the finer points of pastry and bread baking.

For a few days we baked bread and cake and took pics and made videos while enjoying the sunshine on the roof. As usual, people were very impressed by the power of the Lytefire5. Fabienne was particularly impressed saying that it baked faster and more evenly than some of the ovens she had used while working at hotels - high praise indeed!

Haiti is near to my heart, and despite the difficulties of operating in the country, I know that we will have great success there because we have a team of true believers who are doing everything they can to ensure that the country has a prosperous and sustainable future. We all hope to play a significant part in connecting Haiti to the riches of the sun and making this proud nation once again a shining pearl of sustainability in the Caribbean.

We’re very happy to announce the success of our collaboration with the NGO Remar in Burkina Faso. We have officially opened of a brand new, Lytefire powered bakery in Burkina Faso after some weeks of training with the ladies of Remar.

At the request of Remar, an NGO operating in 70+ countries, we worked with their local welding staff to build a Lytefire5 with baking oven, a bakery building, and conducted entrepreneurship and bakery skills training. Remar is taking care of 150 vulnerable peoples on the edge of Burkina Faso’s capital city of Ouagadougou and they are looking for every advantage possible. For one thing, buying bread from the outside costs a considerable amount of precious cash. Thanks to funding from Remar Espana & Remar Schweiz we were able to train Remar welders to build the Lytefire 5, build a new building to house the bakery, buy the equipment and train the ladies of Remar for success in their baking initiative.

This project had the added spice of starting before the WHO declared a global pandemic. In fact, just after finishing the training of the fabricators and the production of the first Lytefire5, project manager Lorin Symington was in the Philippines to follow up on our projects there and meet with the University of Eastern Visayas and the Philippines Coconut Authority to explore the possible avenues for solar thermal to contribute to adding value in the coconut value chain. Lorin left the Philippines just as PH instituted a very early and very strict lockdown. By the time he got the Burkina the world was in a panic and isolation was advised.

Flash forward a few months and Remar/GoSol projects are planned for Haiti, Niger and Mali. During the first months of lockdown Remar and GoSol managed to secure additional funding to ensure exceptional results of the project in Burkina including enough to warrant building a brick and mortar bakery, buy a mixing machine and build a team of local professionals capable of ensuring appropriate training for the women of Remar and ongoing support.

The bakery was officially launched in October and we are happy to report that they are producing +100kg of bread per week as well as 5kg of ‘Madeleine’ personal sized cakes for sale in the city. They’re saving a bundle and making an income on top. The women report being more confident after receiving training because they now have the vocabulary and skills to run a business and earn money to contribute back to Remar, which, as an organization, has done so much for so many of them.

For us, it was truly inspiring to see these ladies, many of whom have not been in school for many years, pick up their pen and paper and calculate profit and loss scenarios while their babies hang on their hips. At first, it was hard to tell which baby belonged to who, because all the babies were being passed around so much. At first, the toddlers were not in class, but once the classroom segment was done and it was time to bake, there were kids constantly underfoot. We had a class full of 15 women, some as young as 15, others 50 years of age, and they cooperated to ensure that everyone, regardless of health condition, literacy level or number of children, had the chance to participate in the training and learn the needed skills to run a small business.

With our aspiring GoSol team in place in Burkina Faso, we are continuing to provide support to this fledgeling business, the success of which gives hope for widespread adoption of direct solar thermal energy systems and an end to deforestation in the Sahel.

We are very happy to have launched a small crowdfunding campaign to support two dynamic guys in Burkina Faso to create a solar bakery and cultural space.

Adama Bafiago, an artist and activist, was an early supporter of our first crowdfunding campaign in 2015. He immediately saw the potential for Lytefire technology in his home country of Burkina Faso. Ever since then he has been messaging us a few times a year asking when we would be able help him and his friend Issaka to stop baking like this:

As luck would have it, our new partner Remar selected us for a project in Burkina Faso and so we finally have a chance to help Adama and Issaka to go solar and stop burning so SO much wood!

As you’ll hear in his videos, Adama has a vision for Burkina Faso. He wants to raise the standard of what bread is. In Burkina, the ‘baguette’ is the standard form of bread, though it hardly resembles the tasty, substantial loaf you would find in Paris. Here, it is a fluffy, snow white cloud with a crisp outer shell that tastes of cardboard. It is baked industrially and with chemical yeast.

Head over to their campaign page to read more about them.

Adama’s vision is to create a bakery that turns local produce like maize, sorghum, millet and mooring into healthy, substantial sourdough using solar energy. As an artist he wants to capitalise on all the attention that they will get and create a cultural space where people can come together to be nourished body, mind and soul, with good food, music, theatre and knowledge sharing.

Here’s a little taste of music from Burkina Faso: