History

Our initiative emerged in 2009 out of a circle of befriended volunteers from Malawi and abroad, working and living with and within village communities in Thyolo District in South Malawi. We are a real mix of people - from those with a university degree to those who never had a chance to finish school due to economic constraints, from a variety of cultures and believes, but all with dedication to equal rights, humanity and the preservation of our common home earth and respect for God’s creation. Be it volunteer caretakers in the communiy-based childcare centres whom we trained in nutrition, basic pedagogic approaches and on making useful teaching materials from local resources, or future primary school teachers whom we taught computer skills, or farmer groups with whom we shared knowledge on how to raise efficiency of their soil naturally with organic farming methods, or the youth in our HIV drama clubs, or the women groups who gave us their perspective on the main challenges they face in their daily life: by acting together and exchanging questions & ideas with hundreds of people from different walks of life in Malawi, and of course by living closely within rural communities, using very restricted resources such as water and electricity access, we got much closer to understanding real life of the majority here.     Based on this personal insight plus many community meetings in different villages, the hypothesis emerged that among the main factors     challenging sustainable development and the break-up of poverty, the immense time, financial means and energy spent on     organising very basic needs like water and fuels for cooking & lighting, and lacking access of knowledge to overcome this, were key.                                 In fact, we found that the lacking knowledge on and use of alternatives to the traditionally used wooddfuels & parrafin are              much more than just a key hinderance to development on several levels, such as health, education, economy, and environment -     namely a deadly but so far greatly neglected threat to two of the greatest goals promoted in development     cooperation: “sustainability” and “food security”... Since autumn 2009, we have been holding dozens of interviews, field-testing the usability and cultural-habitual acceptanctability of different alternative cooking and lighting devices with people in our surrounding rural communities, conducting many surveys, comparing the situation in other countries, consulting best practice reports, formulating & sharing concepts on potential distribution and financing models for Malawi with government departments and other NGOs, etc. End of 2011, we officially handed in our request to register Renew’N’Able Malawi (RENAMA) as an non-governmental organization to the Malawi Government, in order to professionalize our by then purely self-financed and voluntary work and to be able to generate the very needed funds and support that enables us to consult other organizations to incorporate renewable energies in their existing projects in the rural areas of Malawi, enhance the coordination and exchange of best practices between the actors, and implement pilot projects based on our studies which will complement existing efforts in finding the most successful strategies to make healthy & sustainable basic energies accessible to all. Ín March 2012, RENAMA has been sub-contracted under the Malawi Renewable Energy Acceleration Programme to create a pilot inventory of community-based renewable energy projects in Malawiand a exoerience and recommendation report for a national comprehensive incventory that can support both the governmental coordination functions as well as the best practice learning among other stakeholders. In May 2012, the Scottish Government Malawi Development Fund offered a grant to implement our Rural Energy Kiosk pilot project in cooperation with IRRI Scotland. Find more recent developments in our NEWS section...