Nelly Bassily | July 8, 2013
This week’s story from Rwanda highlights one kind of renewable energy − biogas from animal waste. Solar energy is another type of renewable energy.
In Tanzania, as in other African countries, the potential of solar energy is enormous. But the initial costs of purchasing and installing solar energy panels have been unaffordable. As a result, rural areas in particular have not been able to take advantage of solar energy’s potential to meet household needs such as cooking, lighting, and charging mobile phones.
This week’s script highlights the efforts of SolarAid, a UK-based organization that is helping to bring solar energy to rural Tanzania.
One caution to broadcasters: There are a lot of numbers mentioned in this script – 500 Tanzanian shillings, 20,000 shillings, four million shillings, etc. It is not a good idea to include this many numbers in a radio broadcast. Your audience will not remember all the numbers and may lose interest in the program. You can adapt the script by leaving out many of the numbers and making more general statements. For example, at the end of the script, you could say that, with several thousand students in a school and kerosene costing 1000 shillings per student, this money would be enough to buy a large solar energy system for the school.