Village-owned panels now power more than two hundred stalls after dark.
An hour after sunset in Kemaso, the market square should be dark. The town sits at the end of the eastern plateau road, ninety kilometres from the nearest substation, and the national grid has never reached it. Yet on a recent Thursday evening the square was bright with strings of white bulbs, a radio played from a tailor’s stall and a queue of customers waited at a cold drinks kiosk. The power comes from a field of panels on a slope above the town, owned not by a utility or an investor but by the people who use it.
Kemaso is one of nine market towns along the plateau where village-owned solar cooperatives now supply electricity to traders after dark. Together they power more than two hundred stalls, according to figures compiled by the regional cooperative union, up from fewer than thirty three years ago. For many traders it has doubled the length of the working day.
How the cooperatives work
Each cooperative is set up by residents, who buy shares at a modest price – in Kemaso the equivalent of a few weeks’ earnings for a small trader – and elect a committee to run it. Grants from a regional development fund and a loan from a farmers’ savings bank paid for the panels, batteries and wiring. Members pay a monthly fee for a fixed amount of power, metered through prepaid cards, and the income covers maintenance, two paid technicians and loan repayments. Any surplus is either shared among members or spent on extending the network.
The systems are deliberately small. Kemaso’s array generates about sixty kilowatts at its peak and stores energy in a bank of batteries housed in a converted shipping container. That is enough to light the market, run refrigerators for butchers and drinks sellers, charge phones and power sewing machines and a barber’s clippers until about ten at night.
“Before, I closed when the light went, at six,” said Adwoa Mensime, who sells fabric and runs a tailoring stall at the edge of the square. “Now I work until nine. The evening is when the farmers come into town with money in their pockets. I have taken on a second girl to help with the sewing because there is so much work.”
Owners, not customers
The cooperative model matters, organisers say, because earlier attempts to bring power to the plateau failed. A private company installed diesel generators in several towns a decade ago, but fuel prices rose, charges followed and many traders could no longer afford them. A government scheme handed out individual solar lanterns that broke within a year and could not be repaired locally.
Kwabena Ofori-Atta, an engineer who advises the cooperative union, said ownership changed how people treated the equipment. “When it belongs to the town, the town looks after it,” he said. “People report a loose cable straight away. Nobody steals a battery, because it would be stealing from your neighbour. And when something breaks, the technician is someone’s cousin who lives two streets away, not a company three hundred kilometres off.”
The cooperatives also train their own technicians, many of them young women who had left school early. In Duabo, the next town along the road, the cooperative’s two technicians are sisters, aged 21 and 24, who maintain the array and handle billing from a small office beside the bus stand.
Limits and next steps
The systems are not without problems. Long rainy spells in the wet season can drain the batteries, forcing committees to ration power to the most essential stalls. Replacement batteries are expensive and must be ordered from the capital, which can take weeks. Some traders on the edges of markets say they are still waiting to be connected, and a few committees have faced complaints that members connected their relatives first.
The union now hopes to extend the model beyond the markets, to clinics, schools and grain mills. Three towns are raising money to add capacity, and the regional development fund has said it will consider a larger second round of grants next year. In Kemaso, the committee wants to light the road between the market and the bus stand, which passengers currently walk in darkness. “One more string of bulbs,” said Mensime, “and the whole town stays awake.”
