Father Verspieren and Mali Aqua Viva: Lessons Learned from Fighting Drought and Poverty with Photovoltaic Solar Energy in Africa

Mario Pagliaro

doi:10.20944/preprints202002.0298.v1

How it Works
Instructions for Authors
Subject Areas
Advisory Board
screening preprints
About

Advanced Search

Submit preprint Login Register

Share this article with

Create alert

Email:

Load new image

preprints.org > engineering > energy & fuel technology > doi: 10.20944/preprints202002.0298.v1

Preprint Essay Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Father Verspieren and Mali Aqua Viva: Lessons Learned from Fighting Drought and Poverty with Photovoltaic Solar Energy in Africa

Mario Pagliaro ^*

Version 1 : Received: 20 February 2020 / Approved: 21 February 2020 / Online: 21 February 2020 (02:29:52 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 5 March 2020 / Approved: 6 March 2020 / Online: 6 March 2020 (04:12:12 CET)
Version 3 : Received: 2 April 2020 / Approved: 3 April 2020 / Online: 3 April 2020 (03:38:43 CEST)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Journal reference: Sustainability 2020
DOI: 10.3390/su12083136

Cite as:

Abstract

Almost fifty years after the first installations, I identify the main lessons learned from fighting drought and poverty in Africa with direct solar-powered pumps thanks to Father Bernard Verspieren and Mali Aqua Viva. Six main findings and three main recommendations emerge from the present analysis which are of direct relevance to all Africa’s countries whose population has gone from 438 million in 1977 to 1308 million in 2019, with about 600 million still having no access to electricity. In place of “awareness campaigns”, I recommend to organize practice-oriented workshops on solar-powered irrigation and rainwater harvesting held by professional educators of newly established solar energy national institutes. In agreement with today’s expanded approach to education in solar energy, and with the key adult learning principle of motivation to learn, said education will include the economic and social aspects of distributed “generation” of energy and water from sunlight and rainfall.

Subject Areas

photovoltaics; solar energy; Father Verspieren; solar energy in Africa; solar economy; solar pump

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Download PDF

Comments (0)

Your full name

Your affiliation information (e.g., name of your university/institution/organization)

Not displayed online.

Your Email address (not made public)

Importance: How significant is the paper to the field?

Outstanding/highlight paper

Significant contribution

Incremental contribution

No contribution

I am not qualified to judge

Soundness of evidence/arguments presented:

Conclusions well supported

Most conclusions supported (minor revision needed)

Incomplete evidence (major revision needed)

Hypothesis, unsupported conclusions, or proof-of-principle

I am not qualified to judge

Please leave your comment to this article below.

Mathematical equations can be typed in either LaTeX formats \\[ ... \\] or $$ ... $$, or MathML format <math> ... </math>. Try the LaTeX or MathML example.

Type equation:

Preview:

Copy equation into message below

Close menu

Please click a symbol to insert it into the message box below:

Please enter the link here:

Please enter a valid URL

Optionally, you can enter text that should appear as linked text:

Copy link into message below

Close menu

Please enter or paste the URL to the image here (please only use links to jpg/jpeg, png and gif images):

Please enter a valid URL

Copy image into message below

Close menu

Type author name or keywords to filter the list of references in this group (you can add a new citation under Bibliography):

No existing citations in Discussion Group

Wikify editor is a simple editor for wiki-style mark-up. It was written by MDPI for Sciforum in 2014. The rendering of the mark-up is based on Wiky.php with some tweaks. Rendering of mathematical equations is done with MathJax. Please send us a message for support or for reporting bugs.

Close menu

Please declare any conflicts of interest you may have with this paper, financial or otherwise.

I do not have a conflict of interest

I would like to declare a conflict of interest

Display my name on the website Send my name and email address to the authors I want to get recognition for my comment on Publons

[what’s this?]. Link your accounts here

Captcha

Renew

I accept the following conditions:

Comments must follow the standards of professional discourse and should focus on the scientific content of the article. Insulting or offensive language, personal attacks and off-topic remarks will not be permitted. Comments must be written in English. Preprints reserves the right to remove comments without notice. Readers who post comments are obliged to declare any competing interests, financial or otherwise.

We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our diversity statement.

Leave a public comment
Send a private comment to the author(s)