Image Credit: Contributed / Dr. Gerhard Schumacher

By Jill Sperling

Solar Project

Kamloops church group raising money for solar panel installation at Kenyan hospital

Sep 24, 2019 | 5:03 PM

KAMLOOPS — Tens of thousands of patients come through Kapsowar Mission Hospital every year. The 120-bed hospital, located in the highlands of Kenya, serves a relatively poor population using limited resources.

“We deliver babies, we deliver 1,000 a year,” said Volunteer Medical Director Dr. Gerhard Schumacher. “We do 2,000 operations a year, we have a neonatal unit there that is the only neonatal unit that takes care of small premature babies for that region and there’s about 350,000 people in that area and the closest bigger hospital is about two and a half hours away.”

Schumacher is a family physician in Kamloops. He spends six months out of the year in Kapsowar.

Schumacher is currently preparing for his next trip, which will involve the installation of up to 80 solar panels at the hospital.

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“We are going with a team from Southwest Community Church to do an installation of a solar system that will help the hospital become energy-independent,” Schumacher said. “That energy independence will create for the hospital a savings, which will be quite instantaneous, and will provide something like, we think, between $7,000 and $10,000 USD savings per year, which is like two months of salary for nurses and doctors.”

Image Credit: Contributed / Dr. Gerhard Schumacher

The team is hoping those yearly savings will allow for more upgrades to the hospital and improved patient care.

Riverside Energy Systems is designing the rooftop system.

“Here in Canada, many people are not… in tune with how well solar works, even though it works well here,” said Ben Giudici, a director at Riverside Energy Systems. “It works considerably better in Kenya because they’re virtually right on the equator, which means that their energy harvests are in the order of 25 to 30 per cent higher than they would be here in Kamloops.”

The solar panels and other necessary equipment will be purchased from a Kenyan solar distributor that can provide maintenance support.

“One of the important things around a project like this is sustainability,” Giudici says, “rather than just parachuting in and installing a bunch of equipment that no one knows anything about and then leaving. What can often happen in cases like that is no one will know what to do, there will be no support locally and that’s just generally not a good idea, so we’re doing this the other way around.”

Image Credit: CFJC Today / Kent Simmonds

The full cost of the project is around $19,000.

“We’ve had some donations from people who have visited us in Kenya that will help for a portion of it,” Schumacher said. “The hospital itself is putting some money toward it, and we have a remaining amount of about $6,000 to $7,000 USD that we’re trying to raise and that will get us to a very full complement of solar panels.”

Donations to the solar development project can be made through Samaritan’s Purse Canada. People wishing to donate should call 1 (800) 663-6500 and give by credit card to account #008098.

The team from Southwest Community Church will be leaving for Kenya on Oct. 14 and spending two weeks at the hospital.