DAVID WAIRIMU can finally do his homework. An innovative solar-powered
lantern allows him to carry on working when it gets dark. “My position in class
is much better since we got it,” he says. David, who is 14, lives with his
mother Margaret in a mud-walled hut in Engashura, near the town of Nakuru in
Kenya.
Electric lights gleam in Nakura, but Kenya’s ramshackle electricity grid does
not reach 90 per cent of the country’s homes, including those in Engashura.
Until last January, the family’s only light at night was a hurricane lamp
burning kerosene. “It was too dark to…
