Insights from Sub-Saharan Africa
Research paper
Published 5 November 2019
Updated 14 December 2020
ISBN: 978 1 78413 364 1
This ethnographic study is the first of its kind to analyse energy access and resilience strategies deployed in two refugee camps in Kenya and Burkina Faso. It highlights the need for new methodological approaches to expand the evidence base for humanitarian energy interventions and policies.
During one visit to Goudoubo refugee camp the research team came across an unusual structure. The construction had a disarming quality. The highly reflective aluminium sheeting shimmered in the light; the surface displayed a combination of cloudless sky and dusty earth. At first glance, looking at the team’s photographs, it is difficult to discern the structure’s function. The building appears to merge into the background: it blends in. In part, this is due to the reflective surface of the aluminium, but it is also due to the structure’s similarities with others across the camp, many fashioned from a similar range of materials.
Yet this structure is distinct. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear this is a shelter of some sort. It has a door, hinges and a rudimentary lock. The aluminium sheeting, along with scraps of a standard issue UNHCR tarpaulin and pieces of woven matting, has been used as a form of external cladding. These are affixed to a frame made from discarded metal and wooden uprights. Each material component has its own story. The aluminium sheeting, for example, was once part of solar cookers that were distributed by UNHCR. Its appearance as a designed structure prompts several wider questions. How are displaced people actually using humanitarian energy products? What happens to energy technologies when they become redundant? What economic and material value might these products offer beyond their intended purpose? What forms of practical, working knowledge and resourcefulness are required for displaced communities to repurpose these goods?
This chapter reflects on these questions and their relevance to contexts of displacement across sub-Saharan Africa. Many apparently redundant materials have potentially useful purposes beyond their original function. Following one material – sheet metal – opens up other discarded technologies and practices of repurposing to scrutiny.
The use of aluminium sheet metal from a solar cooker in a shelter reveals several important facets of material, social and economic culture in Goudoubo and Kakuma. First, it points to the ingenuity of displaced communities in recognizing the material and utilitarian value of broken energy products. Second, it points to the emergence of novel, localized practices around repurposed energy technologies or products. Trying to address their daily issues on their own, using broken products for unsuspected purposes, speaks loudly of the large variety and linkages between refugees’ unmet needs. Third, it points to the mobility of practical knowledge and skills, such as that required to fashion a shelter.
The project researchers initially met Yaya, who described himself as one of the most talented blacksmiths in the camp, at an artisan centre established in Goudoubo. The strength of his claim soon became apparent when he invited the team to his home and they observed his skills as a fabricator.
Next to Yaya’s standard UNHCR-provided dwelling stood the striking reflective structure described above. A similar structure was built alongside, adjacent to a covered, cooking area constructed from rush branches. Yaya’s skill was evident in the construction of the aluminium-clad shelter, which he proudly described as being based on his own design. For some time after his family’s arrival in the camp, they kept food in the main dwelling. But on several occasions the food had gone to waste, been eaten by goats or been spoiled by rainwater, leading him to devise alternative storage arrangements. He built the shelter to store their food, alongside tools, gas equipment and firewood.
The blacksmith’s shelter was an artefact of the skills and practical knowledge that he had acquired as a young apprentice in Mali. He carried these with him when he left, and in Goudoubo he put them to use meeting new needs and generating a modest income. But the finished shelter was also an artefact of knowledge, relationships and materials that were available in and around the camp itself.
As people seek out materials to improve their lives, they enter into diverse exchange relationships, combining market exchanges with forms of barter and intra-camp bargaining with external exchanges involving members of the host community.
The shelter offers an insight into the socio-economic infrastructure of the camp, as well as the relationships between its inhabitants and other communities in this part of Burkina Faso. As people like Yaya seek out materials to improve their lives, they enter into diverse exchange relationships, combining market exchanges with forms of barter and intra-camp bargaining with external exchanges involving members of the host community.
Goudoubo’s artisan centre gives people access to tools and raw materials, including the aluminium from broken or discarded solar cookstoves. Some people have sought out these to make utensils (from ladles to drinking vessels) and bracelets, either for personal use or for sale in the camp and in Dori.
Yaya borrowed a pair of ready-made pliers from the centre and rummaged through its stock of spare parts to build two hammers. These homemade tools also displayed his resourcefulness. The handles are fashioned from discarded wood and attached to a piece of iron, which is used as the head of the hammer.
Yaya’s skills extend beyond knowledge of construction and materials. His ingenuity is also evident in his ability to procure materials through social networks. The artisan centre does not give metal sheeting away for free. This can be purchased with cash or bartered for other goods. Yaya acquired the 10 aluminium sheets he used in his shelter for a combination of nearly $9 (CFA 5,000) and, as he said, ‘some tea and grilled meat’. The construction of the shelter demanded other materials too. He paid $3.5 (CFA 2,000) for two nail boxes at the artisan’s centre, $21 (CFA 12,000) for two wooden columns in Dori, and just over $2.5 (CFA 1,500) on iron to make the lock-holder.
Such examples of material resourcefulness highlight the ways that displaced people remake their worlds by fabricating tools, livelihoods and shelter from what is at hand, whether these are the non-food items that have been distributed by humanitarian agencies or things that have been discarded by family, friends and neighbours.
So what does it mean to understand these acts of material resourcefulness as displays of practical knowledge and ad hoc or localized innovation?30 And how do their registers of value shift as they find new use?
The Blazing Tubes solar cooker is a common sight in Goudoubo. The research team noticed one of these placed next to a tree outside the home of the project’s translator, Karim. Although somewhat battered and dented it still appeared to be in working order, and still contained cooking oil in the pot. It is a rather awkward design, ungainly in its stature and somewhat unwieldy to move. However, the Blazing Tubes solar appliance has proved an important energy product for tackling issues around access to adequate cooking facilities in camps such as Goudoubo.31 It was developed in 2008 by John Grandinetti following prototype testing in Hawaii and has gone through an iterative process through field testing.
The Blazing Tubes solar cooker provided to Karim by UNHCR in October 2016 differs from the original designs but its essential functioning is the same. One of the key design innovations is the use of the glass tube that sits inside a parabolic, trough-shaped reflector (or compound parabolic curve) and is attached to the heat-retaining pot in the cooking box. The heat for cooking is generated by the solar heating of high-heat vegetable oil in the glass tube, which acts as a heat-transfer fluid. It can reach cooking temperatures of 150°C and the oil only needs to be changed once every 18 months.
Behind the development of this particular design lies a clear recognition of the meteorological conditions under which many displaced people live in sub-Saharan Africa, with large amounts of sunshine. This is one of the reasons UNHCR and other agencies have introduced solar cookers such as Blazing Tubes into camps in Burkina Faso. However, while some reports note the positive response to Blazing Tubes, more recent ones point to limited long-term use on the part of displaced people in Goudoubo.32
Fundamentally, the reason behind this is a cultural one, related to cooking practices. Karim and his wife, Timi, described how the intense heat that the mineral oil reaches often leads to it smoking, which affects the flavour of the food. This may be a design flaw with the oil being reheated continuously over the 18-month period. Owing to the smell from the oil the solar cooker is more suitable for cooking highly spiced foods such as meat, but much less for staple foods such as rice, which take on the flavour of the oil. Karim described how he came to really recognize the powerful smell from the oil when he used the stove to heat water for a bath – the water itself began to smell like mineral oil. The researchers experienced this when Karim took them outside to smell the oil: lifting the lid of the cooking pot there was a distinct smell, akin to refried food.
A similar story emerged when the research team spoke to people in a household two or three minutes away from Karim’s home. A woman here, Coumba, recounted a similar story. She had received her family’s solar cookstove three years previously. She spoke about its advantages and said she still occasionally used it, but she had decided to use it less frequently due to the need to top up the oil and also because of the smell. The petrol-like smell had become so unpleasant to her children that they refused to eat the food.
Cooking smell might be one of the most widely cited reasons for the Blazing Tubes solar cooker not being widely accepted in Goudoubo, but a UNHCR representative also noted other problems. Although the device is designed for sub-Saharan climates, the cooler season in Burkina Faso from November until February and the rainy season from June to September limit the number of cooking opportunities.
This might lead some to conclude that the solar cooker needs a series of simple design tweaks before it can be successfully deployed. Yet the bigger challenge is that many intended beneficiaries see no particular problem with the cooking system they currently use, and the benefits of their ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’ cooking systems continue to outweigh those of ‘cleaner’ or ‘modern’ alternatives. It is no surprise that component materials of cookers are often deemed to be more useful.
Parts of stoves have been used as windbreaks for cooking with fire, a door, part of a fence, storage shelving, to deliver animal feed, and the arms of a chair.
Blazing Tubes solar cookers, particularly the vacuum tube, are also quite fragile and prone to breaking. But they can also become something else when they are broken or redundant: an object of different potential and value. Across Goudoubo the research team identified numerous incidences of creative repurposing. It was aluminium sheet metal from a broken Blazing Tubes cooker that Yaya had acquired as cladding for his shelter. Parts of stoves have been used as windbreaks for cooking with fire, a door, part of a fence, storage shelving, to deliver animal feed, and the arms of a chair.
Timi had come up with her own ingenious use for another broken cooker. The Blazing Tubes solar cooker is manoeuvred through a rudimentary frame that has wheels attached. It is a wheelbarrow of sorts on which the parabolic trough and glass tube sit. Timi put the frame to a different use. As she explained to the researchers, she had been struggling to transport jerrycans of water without a cart or other means of transportation. One day, watching her husband Yaya return from the artisan centre with sheet metal from a broken cooker to build their shelter, she came up with her own solution. For Timi, the broken stove’s potential was self-evident.
The research team identified other comparable examples of repurposing and reuse across Goudoubo. Although not as immediately noticeable as the Blazing Tubes cookers, empty tins of fortified vegetable oil provided by USAID could be found around the camp put to a variety of uses. A row of empty four-litre tins half buried in the ground marked out the boundary of a dwelling. Tins were hung up as storage pots from the branches of a tree. But, in terms of pure function, perhaps the most creative repurposing was the use of these tins as the supports for a bed made of reeds and matting. Given the circulation of these tins and the diversity of uses they are put to around the camp, there is something ironic about the message printed on each one: ‘Not to be sold or exchanged’.
Such examples offer up a more complex portrait of the relationship between humanitarian energy technologies and their contexts of use than that found in field reports or impact assessments. This complexity is perhaps best exemplified by a comment from one of the UNHCR representatives who accompanied the research team on a visit to Goudoubo’s marketplace. This is a space in which local communities and Malian refugees come together to buy and sell goods, and to socialize. A Burkinabe food seller, Safi, was sitting with a group of Malian women under a shelter and offered the researchers two empty armchairs on which to sit. Immediately the researchers recognized that the arms of the chairs were made out of sections of the Blazing Tubes stove. This was a high-skill design assemblage, with the framework of the chair fashioned out of a variety of metal tubing and wooden branches. The seat itself was made from bent twigs, held together with thread. The arms were the most striking due to their sheen but were also part of the solar stoves.
As the researchers sat down on the chairs, the accompanying UNHCR representative turned to the group of refugees and asked, ‘who has done this?’ Before anybody had a chance to answer, he turned to the researchers and said, ‘you see how they spoil our gifts!’ Although the comment was not made with malice, it exposed an important question about the economy of the camp and the expectations among officials of appropriate behaviour, gratitude and material respect among those deemed dependent on the humanitarian provision of basic needs.
Yet the examples in this chapter all point to a disjuncture between the intended and actual or eventual use of energy technologies, highlighting the practice of repurposing as a form of creative innovation and value creation.33
The examples in this chapter offer an important insight into the economics of humanitarian relief. The purchase by UNHCR of Blazing Tubes solar cookers for distribution has obvious budgetary implications. On the surface, the failure of the cookers to adequately fulfil the needs of the refugee community signals an apparent failure and thus a waste of money. In these terms this is an entirely negative outcome in which the utility of humanitarian goods is destroyed and the economic outlay is wasted.
Yet the repurposing of the Blazing Tubes solar cooker in the camp signalled the operation of a parallel system of value. It involves a shift in value – a transformation in the meaning and utility of these things. What began as an economic object to UNHCR, or a humanitarian technology designed to meet a universal basic need, moved into a new value register defined by users themselves. For some, the repurposing of these solar cookers might seem an indictment of the decision-making by investors and policymakers, with the ingenuity of refugees a small silver lining. But, while the repurposed solar cooker may showcase people’s material ingenuity, it is not the sole example of it. The sheet metal is important because it reminds us that people living in Goudoubo are materially ingenious on a daily basis, even if such resourcefulness is frequently ignored by humanitarian interventions.
Understanding people’s adaptive strategies reveals their resourcefulness rather than a culture of dependency. Close attention to the contexts in which people use, adapt and repurpose material technologies provides insight into cultures of production and consumption, and the future provision of humanitarian goods.
Like other members of the displaced Malian community in Goudoubo, people like Yaya and Timi took a localized or situated approach to dealing with their immediate problems. Their material resourcefulness emerged out of necessity – from the failures in the humanitarian distribution of goods that adequately fulfil their needs and the failures of these goods themselves. Their repurposing of available materials challenges any perception that people in their position are reliant only on ‘inbound innovation’,34 via the provision of services and technologies from external agencies.
Weaknesses in the design of the standard UNHCR shelter led Yaya to develop his own solution to the problem of storage, one dependent on his practical knowledge as a blacksmith as well as on the availability of materials such as the discarded aluminium sheeting from the broken Blazing Tube solar cookers. His understanding of the material properties of aluminium, notably its capacity to reflect sunlight, led him to see it as ideal for storing food. Timi’s solution to the challenge of transporting drinking water saw her find new utility and value in the cookers’ metal frame. In both cases, practical knowledge coupled with resourcefulness in recognizing the potential application of discarded materials must be understood as a form of innovation in its own right.
Such examples of what are called ‘indigenous’, ‘frugal’ or ‘bottom-up humanitarian innovation’ have not been sufficiently studied in refugee contexts.35 The qualitative approach here to humanitarian energy demonstrates the importance of better understanding these processes and practices of ‘local innovation’, but one must also be mindful of the drive to operationalize the resourcefulness of refugee communities.
One humanitarian response to the local forms of resourcefulness and practices of innovation described in this chapter might be to try to ‘scale them up’, however, this is not always possible. An alternative and equally important response is to recognize and appreciate these forms of innovation in their own right and to acknowledge the ways they alter the original configurations of economic and use value in humanitarian energy technologies. Participatory or co-design approaches to innovation – which invites displaced people to have a stake in the development of humanitarian technologies, products and services – are increasingly credited with producing a deeper understanding of the specific needs of different communities and accelerating scale.36
