- Gauff Engineering is training 247 young people in off-grid electricity operations in Senegal.
- The project is being funded by German development agency KfW.
The Senegalese subsidiary of the German consulting group Gauff Engineering is training 247 young people to install solar photovoltaic systems. This is part of a project to electrify 300 villages in Senegal. The initiative will accelerate the electrification of the West African country, which plans to have universal access to electricity by 2025.
The training exercise is being funded by the German development agency Kreditanstaltfür Wiederaufbau (KfW) through its subsidiary KfW-IPEX Bank. The students, 71 of whom were women, were trained in the operation, maintenance, and remote supervision of solar PV mini-grids for five days. Among those who benefited were forty executives from the Senegalese Rural Electrification Agency (ASER) and the Moroccan-Senegalese Electricity Company (COMASEL).
Both organizations are implementing the electrification Project for 300 villages in Senegal. According to Lutz Ekhoff, Managing Director of Gauff Engineering, the project has already enabled the installation of 150 solar photovoltaic mini-grids in the regions of Kaffrine, Kaolack, Fatick (in the centre), Louga, Saint-Louis (in the north), and Kolda (in the south).
According to the Managing Director of the Senegalese Rural Electrification Agency, a total of 3,000 households in 44 villages now have access to electricity as part of this project.
In this context, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Exim Bank) approved a loan of $91.5 million in 2020 to facilitate the export of American engineering and construction services to Senegal for rural electrification. This financing operation will eventually connect 330,000 people to solar mini-grids in 415 villages. Weldy Lamont, an American company that exports renewable energy equipment to Africa, is carrying out the work, which is expected to be completed by 2023.