Activity in Mali is getting faster and faster as our malian team keeps on showing outstanding motivation to develop their skills in wind turbine manufacturing. This week we handed in the caps with the name of our Malian venture: EOL Mali. This is the first step in a team strengthening process that will take place over the next year to increase the independence and cohesion of our team and culminate in the formation of Malian law cooperative managed by the group.
We were extremely pleased by the group’s request to stand by a single, officially recognised name: we had deliberately decided to compose our team based on individual qualities, which meant accepting the challenge of dealing with the sometimes delicate relations between the four ethnical groups (Bambara, Bela, Bozo and Dogon) present in the team.
While this sometimes brings delicate discussions, it is also a great opportunity to establish wind turbine production in Mali as a tribute to the countries subtle art to manage its diversity. Seeing individuals establish friendship bonds and develop a common belonging feeling through our activities fills us with joy and confirms a major lesson we have been learning over the past months: success will come from a combination of social and technical work.
On the technical side we have identified a need to strengthen base technical knowledge to further the understanding of the Hugh Piggott turbine by the group. While our group already masters most steps in the production of wind turbines, they still need to appropriate the machine and feel they understand it fully. After long exchanges, it became clear that the acquisition of basic physics knowledge would be instrumental in that process. As such over the next two weeks, we will dispense an education on electricity, before we move on to talk about loads distribution when we start constructing lattice towers to replace the previous monopile designs which pose supply chain problems in Mali.