Rural Solutions (R.S), founded by Mr. Atud Jonathan Asaah, has been working in the northwest of Cameroon to help increase access to electricity and develop rural economic growth through micro hydro projects.
Despite the high level of insecurity in the northwest of Cameroon due to the civil war that has disrupted major project activities this year, Mr. Asaah shared with us about the latest situation in Bessi Village, where he and the Rural Solutions RS are building a micro hydro intake structure. He also provides recommendations on how to improve energy access in Cameroon.
Bessi village is one of the 22 villages that make up the present day Batibo subdivision and is located 45 km from Bamenda, the chief town of the North West region of Cameroon. The geography of the village is hilly with small water resources dotted in almost all the quarters and provide favorable conditions to set up “run-of-the river” type of micro hydro electricity projects for off-grid lighting. This is recommended because it requires basic civil infrastructure. It should be noted that the parliament deliberated and adopted BILL No. 896/PJL/ in 2011 comprising the Law governing the electricity sector in Cameroon and paved the way for the liberalization of the electricity sector, since then, there has been a very timid response from private investors especially small scale producers due to poor incentives. Less than 17% of the Cameroon rural population has access to electricity. For the government to achieve its objective of rural electrification, the production, transmission, distribution and supply of power needs to bring onboard private small scale producers who can produce and sell the energy to the national grid at least at production cost. This will gradually lead to a smart grid system. At the moment, Cameroon is facing an extreme energy shortage and it has put many remote areas into darkness. The present demand for energy has gone far above the production capacity Like in metropolitan areas, new settlement areas are coming up every day and due to the many bottlenecks to get domestic grid subscription, and some people fall into illegal connections (“branchements anarchiques”) and falsifying the subscribers’ inventory of the national grid line. Many step down transformers are overloaded giving way to voltage fluctuations.
Cameroon has a unique position within the CEMAC region, an Economic Commission of Central African states, whose principal objective is regional integration for economic growth. Cameroon is also the third country in Africa with the highest hydro potential (after the DRC and Ethiopia) with approximately 23,000 megawatts of exploitable hydro power. At present Cameroon has exploited just approximately 3%. For Cameroon to take an economic advantage of this position, there is a need to strengthen its energy sector to power its industries which inevitably is the locomotive.