Hydro Electricity at Sachibondu

When the rest of the country is under harsh load shedding, where most people are only getting two hours of electricity per day, we at Sachibondu are blessed with hydro electricity from the turbine on our dam on the lake. This provides us with electricity around the clock (most of the time) despite very low voltage. The low voltage means, those with washing machines must wait to the late hours of the night to use the machine, and kettles/irons etc cannot be used at the busy times of day. But, we have power and we are so grateful for this.

However, the turbine is aging and generally need of replacement and on top of this, as we have grown as a community, the pressure on the turbine has grown considerably.

The problem we are currently facing is that every few weeks, the turbine belts keep breaking and the whole site loses power. Each belt costs over k10,000 which currently is the equivalent of £270. This is a huge struggle for us as a team to find the money for this every few weeks. This happened a couple of nights ago, thankfully we had bought a spare, so we managed to fix the problem relatively quickly, but it had only been 6 weeks since the last belt broke.

The long term goal is to rebuild the dam wall which now has many cracks, and build it bigger, and replace the turbine. But this is an incredibly expensive project costing over £250,000.

If anyone would like to partner with us financially towards the maintenance costs of the dam/turbine, please do contact us.