The SolarTech Literacy Hub: Community-Led Clean Energy & Stewardship Initiative

Lagos, Nigeria| Community, Energy, Education

Project Story

Having spent years working at the intersection of development and environmental action in Lagos, I have watched our neighborhoods struggle constantly under the weight of a failing national electricity grid. Every day, the roar of petrol and diesel generators fills the air, choking our streets with toxic fumes while fuel prices continue to skyrocket, crushing the incomes of local families.

At the same time, our communities are becoming dumping grounds for cheap, imported solar lanterns and batteries that are thrown into landfills the moment a minor wire snaps because no one locally knows how to fix them. Our public schools completely lack practical science tools, leaving our youth completely disconnected from the green economy.

We cannot wait for a centralized solution. This campaign will directly fund a youth and women-led solar repair and climate literacy hub in Lagos, transforming electronic waste into educational tools and building an independent, clean energy micro-economy right where it is needed most.

Our Mission

We believe that true environmental stewardship begins when a community stops being a passive consumer of green technology and becomes its master. Our mission is to bridge the gap between economic survival and climate action through hyper-local technical literacy. By training marginalized youth and women to repair, maintain, and assemble decentralized solar hardware, we keep hazardous electronic waste out of our soil and water while lowering energy costs. This project builds a direct, intergenerational pipeline of ecological consciousness, turning certified local technicians into mentors who bring hands-on renewable energy tools into underfunded classrooms.

Background & Problem Statement

Lagos is a rapidly expanding mega-city where grid instability is a disruptive daily reality. To survive, small businesses and households rely on fossil-fuel generators, causing severe urban air pollution and driving up carbon emissions. While solar energy is the obvious alternative, the market is flooded with sub-standard components. Because the community lacks technical troubleshooting skills, slightly faulty solar units are rapidly abandoned as electronic waste, leaking heavy metals into our local ecosystems.

Concurrently, a crushing cost of living combined with a lack of practical vocational training leaves local youth and women economically excluded. This educational deficit starts early: public primary and secondary schools in our target areas lack basic laboratory infrastructure. Students learn about science and climate change purely from abstract textbooks, without any opportunity to interact with renewable technologies or collect real-world environmental data.

The Project

We are establishing a physical, community-managed workshop space that serves as a vocational training center and an environmental education deployment node. Over a 6-month period, we will run an intensive technical program to certify local youth and women as green technicians. These trainees will apply their skills directly by assembling mobile, transparent "Eco-Lab" kits equipped with digital sensors, which will be permanently deployed to run experiential eco-clubs across 5 local schools.

Our Approach

Instead of buying and distributing expensive, imported systems that will eventually break down, our approach focuses entirely on human capacity and circular economy principles. We source locally available components, tools, and even discarded solar electronics to use as raw teaching materials.

By training a dedicated cohort of local residents, we establish a permanent "solar maintenance desk" within the community, ensuring that clean energy infrastructure stays functional for years. To scale this impact, our technicians don’t just graduate into the workforce; they become educators, bringing our custom-built mobile solar kits into public schools to teach younger students how to utilize digital probes to audit local soil and water health.

Timeline

Months 1–2: Hub Setup & Cohort Selection
- Securing the physical workshop space, procuring tools (multimeters, soldering stations, safety gear), and hosting community town halls to select our first cohort of 25 trainees (targeting at least 50% women).
Months 3–4: Technical Training & Kit Assembly
- Running the 6-week intensive practical solar craft course. Trainees move from basic circuitry to full system sizing, fault troubleshooting, and e-waste harvesting. By month 4, the cohort completes the hand-assembly of 10 mobile, transparent "Eco-Lab" kits.
Month 5: School Deployments & Eco-Club Launch
- Deploying the 10 kits across 5 selected local schools and launching the weekend "Junior Earth Stewards" program, training students to use the integrated digital probes for environmental monitoring.
Month 6: Community Maintenance Desk & Evaluation
- Opening the weekly community repair desk managed by our top graduates, conducting final project evaluations, and open-sourcing our training manuals for the wider Ma Earth network.

Our Team

The project is led by a dedicated team of sustainability, climate justice, and development professionals based directly in Lagos. Our background includes advanced research in disaster management, specialized international training in human rights, and years of hands-on experience managing community-based advocacy and regional social change initiatives. We have a proven track record of partnering with local educational frameworks and grassroots groups to execute structured, transparent, and highly organized community projects.

Our Project in Numbers

50 local youth and women fully certified as clean energy maintenance technicians.
10 custom-built, mobile solar "Eco-Lab" learning kits deployed to the field.
5 local schools equipped with permanent, active environmental stewardship clubs.
1000+ public school students engaged in hands-on renewable energy and digital data-gathering workshops.
100% of our technical solar repair and assembly manuals made open-source and free to the public.

Why Now

The combination of removing national fuel subsidies and the rising costs of traditional energy has pushed local micro-enterprises and families to a breaking point. Meanwhile, environmental degradation from electronic waste and generator emissions is worsening daily. Our community cannot wait for top-down infrastructural updates; we need to build our own ecological and economic resilience right now.