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A rural community near the port town of Saint-Louis on the Senegal-Mauritania border will now benefit from a solar-powered pump system financed by the German Agency for International Development Cooperation. Powered by an array of solar panels with a combined 14.8 kW capacity, the solar pumping system can pump up to 2,000 cubic meters of water daily down a 7 km irrigation canal.

Benefiting up to 400 market farmers, the project has been implemented by non-governmental organization (NGO), Enda Tiers Monde, as part of the company’s wider Sustainable Energy for Entrepreneurship and Climate Program.

Access to electricity in rural Senegal is much lower at 38%, compared to urban access figures of 88% and with renewable power solutions recently becoming more cost-effective, these technologies play a crucial role in electrifying remote regions of the country. Solar energy, in particular, is a vast untapped resource – 90% of Senegal’s landmass receives between 1,600-1,800 kWh of solar radiation per year which is far above the global average. Sitting on the far western edge of the Sahara, Senegal has sun power in abundance but water is far more scarce. Senegal has been classified by the United Nations as a water-poor country, with less than 1,000 cubic metres of freshwater, per capita.

Formed in 1972 in Senegal’s capital city of Dakar, Enda Tiers Monde is now an international non-profit promoter of sustainable development with projects across 40 countries. Its Enda Energie program started a decade later and has gone on to install solar power plants across Senegal including Saint Louis (north western region), Thiès (western region), Kolda (southern region), Fatick (south western region) and Niayes (north western region), along with this latest community project in Khor Bango. The NGO has ensured leadership in this space and others have followed, with a partnership between private infrastructure development group, InfraCo Africa, and renewable solutions firm, Bonergie Irrigation SAS, announced late September last year committing $2.4 million in funding towards the installation of 2,000 solar pumps for irrigation across Senegal within the next three years.