Luz en Casa Amazonia reaches more rivers in Loreto
08/12/2019- Since 2017, we offer affordable, sustainable electricity service to isolated Amazonian communities in the Peruvian department of Loreto; today, more than 400 families are benefited from this action by the Napo river basin.
- We are developing a new project to reach, at least, 1,000 additional families by the Napo river, as well as other basins in the department of Loreto.
- This project is carried out in collaboration with the Technical University of Madrid, with co-funding from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation –so called AECID–.
The Luz en Casa Amazonia programme continues progressing in the Peruvian department of Loreto; up today, 411 households have had access to a basic electricity service in the Napo riverside communities. To end the escalation of the action by that river, and to start the replication by other basins, we are developing a new project to bring electricity to 1,000 additional households.
Within this project, we have signed interinstitutional collaboration agreements with the mayors of the districts of Urarinas-Maypuco and Requena to promote the universal accesso to electricity service in their territories. As a part of those agreements, those authorities have supported us to pre-identify almost 30 localities by the Napo, Ucayali and Marañon basins, where our electricity service with third generation solar home systems may be offered. These systems are easy to use and transport, as well as they are robust and pollutant-free, what make them suitable for remote and environmentally sensitive locations, offering a performance in accordance with the demand of users in these communities: more than 4 hours of electric light, charge of a mobile phone and operation of an electric device (radio, TV…) for about 2 hours.
Besides that electricity service, which will be used by more than 5,000 people, this project will improve our procedures, what will facilitate the sustainability of the programme in the long term. For this reason, the Technical University of Madrid is our partner in the project, analysing and evaluating the processes and procedures of Luz en Casa Amazonia to promote its scalability; the main result will be the definition of the processes and the analysis of potential technological solutions that allow accelerating, improving and scaling up them. It will also revise our exploitation management system and it will implement improvements as a result of those functionalities and new needs.
In addition, with that improving aim, it is also planned to strengthen our processes to consider, specifically, international right standards for indigenous populations. This is especially relevant for acciona.org because, in Peru, Mexico and Panama, we implement our projects in areas with many indigenous groups living in –in this case, isolated rural communities in the Peruvian Amazonia–. This will result in consolidating some aspects we already consider in the design, execution and exploitation of our projects, such as our approach of voluntary participation to, if target population accept, apply their right of improving the conditions of their homes, taking into account that an environmentally-friendly electrification project is pertinent and it can have a high level of appropriation.
We have co-funding from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation –so called AECID–, through the call 2018 of innovation actions for development, to carry out this project.
acciona.org and the Sustainable Development Goals
The access to the electricity service of Luz en Casa impacts positively on the economy, society and environment of the beneficiaries of this action, which is aligned with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) included in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda.
At acciona.org we work to bring access to energy, water and sanitation to very low-income people who live not being included in any plan of extension of those service, for which we apply technological and managerial innovation criteria. Thus, we contribute to achieve the SDG directly related SDG6 on water & sanitation, SDG7 on sustainable & affordable energy, and SDG9 on resilient infrastructures and promotion of innovation. That contribution is part of the ACCIONA commitment to the SDG’s.
We also favour the achievement of other SDG’s through the positive impacts of our activity resulting in reduction of poverty, improvement of health, education, equality, work, etc., as well as through the collaborative view with which we execute our actions, such as this new project in the Peruvian Amazonia that is carried out with the collaboration of the Technical University of Madrid, as well as co-funding from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation.
