Feature: Solar backpack to boost learning for poor Kenyan children

From hunger and malnutrition to striking teachers keeping them off normal learning for many days, a Kenyan child goes through diverse challenges to succeed in education.

But poverty is seemingly unforgiving. It makes learning even harder for those coming from poor households in rural and urban areas. Largely does it contribute to the lack of access to clean sources of energy for lighting -- a significant factor to creating a conducive environment for the children's studying activities during the night.

It is estimated that 87 percent of the Kenyan rural and 42 percent of the urban population use kerosene for lightning. The fossil fuel that the World Health Organization (WHO) accounts to indoor pollution can cause diseases such as lung cancer and tuberculosis.

While various state and non-state actors seek to increase distribution of the electricity and promote widespread use of solar, 22-year-old Salima Visram, a Kenya-born from coastal region, is seeking to change the learners' studying lifestyle.

The solar backpack she developed last year is harmonizing the comfort of a free smoke polluted environment and controlled disease infection home among the pupils in parts of the country.

The solar device constitutes of a solar panel, a battery pack within the lamp, and an LED lamp.

"When a child walks to school every day, the battery gets charged and when they come home, they can use the light to study every night. An hour in the sun gives a child 5 hours of light," said Visram on Wednesday.

Three primary schools distributed across the regions are among those that have benefitted from the distribution of the 500 pieces of the device, enabling the children to do their homework and extend their learning with ease.

The schools selected on pilot basis include Kikambala Primary School in Kilifi county, another in Kibera, the largest slum settlement in Nairobi and the third primary school based in Kisumu, western Kenya.

Visram is committed to engage the Kenyan government and other non-governmental organisations in reaching out to more than 500 learners from impoverished families in Kenya.

"In fact, one father in Kikambala said he can only afford to buy kerosene three times a week, which means that his children could only study three times a week and this affected their performance in school," said the International Development and Management graduate from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

"Through my research, I realized that not being able to study at night was a big reason why children weren't making it to secondary school as they didn't achieve the grades," said Visram, who envisions expanding to other countries in the African continent.

Coming up with the product never came easy. Visram had to interview executive officers and engineers among other professionals managing solar companies in Asia and Africa to understand the business environment.

She raised 50,000 U.S. dollars through Indiegogo, a crowd funding platform, to fund her development of the solar backpack.

"Children deserve to study effectively through the night without the use of the carcinogenic kerosene lamps. This way they could develop the culture of reading which a huge part of early childhood development is,"she added.

Use of kerosene for lighting is detrimental to the health of children since it results to death causing illnesses, she argued.

The cost of kerosene in Kenya has over the last five years remained high, a translation of an economic pressure to thousands of households mainly depending on it for lighting and cooking.

The prices are even higher for consumers in the villages as cost per litre is inflated by 46 percent, a report by World Bank on kerosene consumption in Kenya indicates.

For the poor households, affording to buy the commodity to facilitate the learning of their children every day ends up to be a luxury, a lack unfortunately affecting the educational progress of the pupils and students.

Visram's innovation is perhaps as step towards the right direction for the Kenyan child yearning for education.

Though, she has not started selling the devices, Visram hopes that they will bring change to the pupils who have already received them in the pilot schools. The determination of the prices could be informed by a social impact assessment among other factors, she said. Endit