The mission of I Love Windpower is to bring the freely availlable knowledge about locally produced wind turbines to developing countries. Up till now, in Tanzania we have been conducting numerous of master classes which resulted in more than 10 wind turbines and more than 100 educated participants. From a sustainable point of view, a very logical next step is, to have teachers as participants. In this way, the knowledge about wind energy and turbines can be spread among new students every year again and again. We happily discovered to be on the same mission of ‘Training of Teachers’ as the Dutch NGO ETC.
In Tanzania, the vocational training in craftsmen skills like carpentry, welding, electronics (and a lot more) is organized throughout the Vocational Education Training Authority, shortly VETA. At their head quarters in Dar Es Salaam we found the management board very pleased to work together with us. So with the combined effort and resources of VETA, ETC, and I Love Windpower, we are now able to conduct a training for teachers of various VETA-centers from all over the country. The training itself is hoisted at VETA Dodoma which has a good training center and a very conducive workshop. During the training the last couple of days, I just forgot that Tanzania is a developing country. The workshop tools and the skills of the teachers in this center are on a real high level.
Back to the essential: the teachers in our training. They are the ones who are going to spread the knowledge after this training. They understand the wind technology quite well and are very motivated! We build two turbines of the same size and type, but we could easily have done variations without confusing them. I am convinced that they will be able to build other sizes from the ‘Recipe book’ independently.
At the moment, we are at the end of the first week. Although we faced two major power cuts of more than 12 hours, we are still on schedule: the first turbine is ready including electronics, tower and a prepared site. In the next week the participants/teachers will be challenged even more because they will get less instructions and will be stimulated to teach already about this matter to their fellow teachers. The first turbine will be installed early next week on the VETA-site, the second turbine will be installed late next week in the health center of a remote and off-grid village. We’ll keep you updated on that.